Chapter Twenty
While she walked, she inspected the wounds on her upper arms with careful fingers, wincing with every prod. There was a gouge on her chest above each breast where the muki’s thumb claws had slid in, and then four on the fleshy part of her upper arm.
They weren’t as deep as she had feared, but they would certainly leave scars and they throbbed fiercely as she trudged past the castle gates and through the castle halls. By the time she made it back to her room, she was dizzy with pain.
All she wanted to do was clean off the blood and gore plastered onto her face and try to forget the disaster she found herself in, but once submerged in the luxuriously warm waters of her bathing chamber, one specific image would not leave her be.
The muki above her chanting, its eyes dead but its mouth moving nonstop.
Solana took her dagger and plunged it into its temple.
Still, it spoke. She gouged its eyes. Still, it speared her on the tips of its claws.
She slit its throat and all that did was amplify its voice, until the word nakapana was pouring from every orifice, rising like a tide that pulled her under and held her down.
Solana clawed her way back to the surface, far away from the deep underbelly of the dark that cradled her close. She needed air, she needed to breathe, she was going to choke on the word and—
Cool water splashed onto the floor as she thrashed awake. A singular globe light in the corner burned dimly, and Solana inspected the room carefully, eyes wide and nostrils flared. She was utterly alone. There was no one there to kill her, or to comfort. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
She sunk against the stone with a deep exhale and winced at the throb in her arms. She was shivering from the cold, but even after she left the water and dressed, the chill wouldn’t abate.
A quick look in the mirror showed wounds that flared bright red at the edges.
Demon poison couldn’t kill her, but infection could.
It was Sami who had said that, always reminding her of her humanity, like a weapon against her recklessness and idiocy.
One wrong move, and she’d end up like her father.
Dead, branded a traitor, a cautionary tale.
Or apparently, alive and trapped in the underworld, suffering a different sort of torment, equally alone and traitorous and condemned to death.
Solana pressed her finger into the wound over her heart and groaned from the ache of it. She was nothing like that man. She also wasn’t stubborn enough to not admit when she needed help, even if the person who could help her was the last person she wanted to see.
The one time she had been to his room, she had been out of her mind with pain and half dead, and when she had left, they were tentative allies. Partners. She tried to remember that as she knocked on his door, and as he opened it in nothing but a pair of loose brown pants.
It looked like he had done the same as her and bathed as soon as he returned. His silver hair was wet, and there were drops of water dripping from the ends and rolling onto his shoulders and down his chest. She watched the lazy path they carved over his tanned skin and swallowed.
Reyes smiled knowingly and leaned against the threshold, arms crossed over his chest. He trailed ashen eyes over her face, then her neck, and down to the opening of her shirt, where a single puncture was visible.
They stopped there, and one of his hands reached out and gently pushed the shirt aside, his fingertips brushing her skin with a touch so soft it might have been imagined.
She hadn’t bothered wrapping her breasts, and she saw the exact moment Reyes noticed.
A muscle twitched in his jaw as he averted his gaze, but he stepped aside and pulled the door open farther in invitation.
Solana tried not to let his revulsion bother her.
It hardly mattered what he personally felt for her as long as they could uphold their ends of the bargain.
She needed to be alive for that, which meant swallowing her pride and asking for Reyes’s help.
The room was much the same as the first time she saw it.
There were books and notebooks on every surface, some of them opened and marked with various objects.
A tunic hung over the chair in front of the desk that sat askew, as if that was where he had been before he answered the door.
He grabbed it and threw it over his head.
Solana reluctantly looked away from the way the muscles of his back flexed with such an innocent movement.
It was not the time for ogling, especially when it was clearly not welcomed.
Luckily, his room was just as interesting as he was.
A dichotomy of maturity and mess. Boots arranged neatly in front of an armoire that was half open from his black Masters coat hanging on the door.
A bed that was tidily made but covered in sheaves of paper that he somewhat frantically gathered into two hands and pushed aside.
She shouldn’t have interrupted whatever it was he was doing.
They hadn’t left on a good note, and he had made it perfectly clear that she was a disappointment.
How pathetic that she had no one else to go to.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she said, gesturing to him and the room as she backed toward the door.
She could find bandages and medicine in the infirmary where she was sure the nice woman with the white bonnet would be glad to help her.
It was more than she’d done for wounds she had received in the past, and the scars across her body were proof of that. What were a few more?
She turned to go, but stopped when his long fingers wrapped around her arm.
“Solana,” Reyes murmured. His thumb made a small circle on the inside of her wrist. “Stay.”
She found herself nodding. Allowed herself to be guided to his bed, where he walked into her until she had nowhere else to go but sit on the edge.
“We can go to the infirmary, if you’d be more comfortable there,” he said, darting a look at the neckline of her shirt as if itching to get to the wounds underneath. She wondered if his gift felt like hers. A pull. A calling that could not be ignored.
Could he see that she was nervous? That she cared about what he thought of her, and the things he said were always at the forefront of her mind? “This is fine,” she told him.
He nodded toward the bed. “Shift back a little further, please.”
She did as he asked and then watched as he rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt.
It was lightweight enough that those dark markings could be seen through it, and the fire burning in the corner made it appear as if it were glowing.
Solana was barely aware of anything else as Reyes stepped closer.
“You’ll have to unbutton these,” he said, gesturing toward the two small buttons on the front of her shirt. “And pull the collar down.”
Again, she did as he asked, hoping that he didn’t notice the way her fingers shook and fumbled the buttons. Once they were free, she pulled the shirt down so that her shoulders and chest were exposed to the top of her breasts.
“I’m going to put one hand here.” His palm hovered over the center of her chest, his long fingers reaching from shoulder to shoulder.
“And the other hand here.” He bent over her and reached behind so that his arms were a cage.
She tilted her head back to give him more space, but it put her mouth right at his neck.
She saw as he swallowed, and swore she could see his pulse racing in his throat.
“This is going to hurt, but I’m not trying to hurt you.”
Those words again. They were unnecessary, but she appreciated them all the same. “I know,” she breathed. And then she exhaled into his touch.
There was ice in her veins. Spears of it stabbing and stitching and mending.
Solana whimpered and dropped her head against Reyes’s shoulder.
She could feel him speaking, the vibration of his words penetrating the deep, agonizing ache of his gift, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying.
She was too aware of herself, of every inch of her body that was broken and bruised.
If only he could mend the darkest parts of her.
Let the cold of his gift shatter and repair the selfish and the undeserving right out of her.
Take this gift she felt lurking deep within and give it to someone else.
“How much longer?” she gasped out.
As soon as she said the words, the cold was gone, replaced with an emptiness that left her reeling. Reyes’s body bowed into hers. They were a tangle of heaving chests and shaking arms.
“You fight me at every turn,” he said between deep breaths. “It would be so much easier if you’d let me in.”
“I thought I was,” she replied breathlessly.
Reyes huffed a laugh and then extricated himself from her and flopped onto the bed, his arms coming to rest over his eyes as if he could sleep for the next several days.
She thought perhaps she would feel the same, but she was too wound up.
Too full of regret and resentment and wishful thinking to lie down next to him.
When she slid off the bed, Reyes said nothing. He kept his eyes covered even as she walked to his desk and the books spread across the top. With gentle fingers, she turned a page, then another. Then she slid a book to the side and glanced at the one underneath it.
So many words and drawings and diagrams. There were notes written sloppily into the margins and Solana smiled knowing that his handwriting was grotesque.
She couldn’t read any of it and wondered if even he knew what he had written.
She kept flipping and glancing until she saw something that stopped her cold.
Her eyes devoured the word that made it hard to breathe.
A trick of the light, she thought, but she bent and inspected it closer.
Ususi, it said.
Solana fell into the chair and pulled the book closer. “Reyes,” she whispered urgently. “What is this?”