17. A Heart Still Beating
Alex
Avoice echoed somewhere in my mind, soft and far away, and I reluctantly surfaced from sleep, certain it couldn’t yet be morning.
My eyelids flickered. The tiredness sat behind them like an itch I couldn’t scratch, that bone-deep weariness that came of a day well spent and a night spent better still.
So I knew without opening my eyes that it wasn’t yet time to rise.
I couldn’t even be sure the voice had been real, or only the last echo of some dream already dissolving, gone the instant I tried to catch hold of it.
I rubbed my eyes and arched my back, chasing comfort, trying to sink back down into the land of nod.
The movement pressed my bare skin flush against Atlas’s, and my body, the traitor, woke instantly and entirely, yearning toward him before my mind had finished the thought.
I turned onto my side to face him, propped up on one elbow, and let myself watch him sleep.
It had been, by every measure, a perfect day.
I’d hit a bullseye. An actual, genuine bullseye, with Atlas’s arms wrapped around me and his voice low in my ear.
I had been so absurdly proud of myself that I’d very nearly cried about it.
There had been sunlight and laughter and Lazaros’s terrible jokes, and then there had been the evening, which had been better still.
Atlas had barely let me finish my supper.
I’d caught the look in his eye somewhere around the second course, that dark, patient, devastating heat, and the moment the meal was done he’d taken my hand and all but carried me back to our room.
And what had followed had left me boneless and aching in all the very best ways.
The pleasant soreness of it still hummed through me now, and I couldn’t help the small, smug smile that curved my mouth at the memory.
But it was what had come after that I kept turning over in my mind.
Because after, when we lay tangled and breathless in the dark, the candles guttering low, Atlas had done something rarer than any of it.
He had talked.
About them… His parents.
I’d asked, half-expecting him to deflect, but instead he’d gone quiet for a long moment, and then he’d given them to me.
His father, Hyperion.
A great mountain of a king, he’d said, with a laugh that could fill a hall and a temper like a summer storm, there and gone in a breath.
A man his people had loved. A man who had taught both his sons to ride, to fight, and to rule, and who had carried Atlas on his shoulders through these very halls when he was small enough to fit there.
And then he’d told me about his mother.
His father, Atlas said, had called her his flower. Always, from the very beginning. And when I’d asked why, he’d smiled a small, sad smile in the dark, as he’d given me her name.
Ianthe.
It meant violet, he told me, in the old tongue.
Hyperion had loved its meaning so much that the spring after they wed, he’d had a whole bed of violets planted in the castle gardens, so that some part of her would bloom there every year for the rest of their lives.
There used to be violets all through those grounds, Atlas had said, his voice gone soft and far away.
His earliest memory was of his mother kneeling among them with soil on her hands, laughing up at his father in the sun.
Though he’d admitted, quieter still, that they hadn’t flowered since.
He was gentler than ever speaking of her, his voice dropping to something almost adoring.
Hair as dark as a raven’s wing, he’d said, and a laugh that Lazaros had inherited.
She also had a way of looking at a person as though she could see straight down to the truth of them.
He had loved her. That much was plain in every single word.
And yet in all of it, in every warm and aching memory he laid into my hands, there hadn’t been a single word about how either of them had died.
I recall he had told me briefly, that day in the woods, how he had come back from a campaign to find his mother had died, nobody really knowing the cause.
And of course, Lazaros was blamed for his father’s death, though I still didn’t know the details, and it seemed Atlas still wasn’t ready to share them.
I’d noticed the careful shape of the silence around it.
The way he gently steered away from the edge of that particular grief.
The way a man learns to walk around a wound that had never quite healed.
And I had wanted to ask. Of course, I had.
But I’d felt the rawness of it radiating off him in the dark.
Like some old, deep wound still bleeding somewhere beneath the surface, and so I’d done the only kind thing there was to do.
I’d let it lie.
I’d kissed the centre of his chest, right over his heart, and told him thank you for telling me. Then I let him pull me down into sleep with his arms locked tight around me as though, even unconscious, he was afraid I might slip away.
And now, here in the dark, I lay watching him.
The worry never showed on his face when he slept.
The crown, the war, the guilt he still carried like a stone in his chest over what he’d so nearly done to Lazaros, all of it smoothed away.
Now leaving him younger somehow, and unbearably at peace.
I knew he was still hiding pieces of himself from me.
I could feel it, even now, even after everything.
But looking at him like this, I knew I could wait.
I knew I could be patient and earn the rest of him a little at a time.
My fingers drifted up to push a strand of dark hair back from his brow.
And then the voice from my dream called again.
‘Alexandra.’
I froze, my hand hovering above his skin.
It was a woman’s voice. Feminine and low and threaded through with something urgent, something close to anguish.
As if whoever she was needed me, and needed me now.
Which was why I couldn’t bear to wait a moment longer.
It didn’t come from the room. It came from somewhere far below it, rising up through the stone of the sleeping castle to find me.
And the moment I heard it, really heard it, I knew.
I had felt this before.
That afternoon, in the corridor outside the kitchens, standing in front of that plain, iron-banded door while Atlas told me it led down to nothing but the cellars. I had felt something then, too.
A pull.
A whisper just beneath the reach of hearing, reaching up through the old wood as if to catch hold of me by the ribs and draw me in. I’d shaken it off. Told myself I was tired and starving. That I was imagining things, before I let him lead me away toward the smell of fresh bread.
But there was no shaking it now.
Now, in the dead black middle of the night, with the whole castle sunk in sleep around me, the voice was obvious. And it was coming from behind that same door… I just knew it.
‘Alexandra.’
It grew louder, more desperate, that hint of anguish sharpening into something that made my chest ache in answer. I looked at Atlas, certain the sound would wake him, certain anyone would wake to a thing so loud, but he slept on, undisturbed, his breathing slow and even.
I knew I should wake him. I’d promised him I would, only that morning. Next time, I’ll wake you, that’s what I had said.
And I opened my mouth to do exactly that.
But then, for some reason, I found that I couldn’t.
As if something physically stopped me from uttering a word.
As though the voice had reached into me, closed its fingers around the impulse, and held it still.
I told myself I was only being kind. That he was exhausted, that he needed the rest. That I’d be there and back before he ever stirred. They were good lies.
They almost held.
Carefully, so carefully, I lifted the covers and slid out of the giant bed.
The night chill raised goosebumps along my bare body.
I reached for my robe and pulled it on, the silk a poor substitute for the warmth I’d just left.
Then, with one last look at the man I loved sleeping peacefully in our bed, I crossed to the chamber door, eased it open, and slipped out into the hall.
‘Alexandra.’
The voice echoed down the corridor the moment I closed the door behind me, loud enough that I flinched and pressed back against the wood.
Almost certain it would rouse the entire castle.
But no door opened. No guard came running.
The halls stayed dark, silent, and empty.
Just as if the voice called only for me.
So I followed it.
Down dim, torch-lit corridors where the shadows stretched and shrank along the rough-hewn stone, the flames guttering in erratic little flickers as I passed.
Until I came at last to the narrow stretch of hallway outside the kitchens.
And there it was. The plain iron-banded door, exactly where I’d left it, looking like something not worth anyone’s time.
The voice was directly behind it now. I was sure of that.
My hand closed around the cold iron ring, and I pulled. Honestly, I half-expected it to be locked, and a deep, unspoken part of me wished it had been. Any excuse to ignore the deeply rooted hold the voice seemed to have on me.
However, the door swung open without a sound onto a stairway that spiralled down and down, cold and faintly damp beneath my bare feet.
I descended, one careful step after another.
The torchlight thinned the deeper I went, until the stairs finally ended and opened out not into hell, but into the cellar.
Just as Atlas had said.
Long, low vaults marched away into the gloom on every side, lined floor to ceiling with racks of dusty bottles and great oak barrels taller than I was. The cold air was thick with the smell of old wine and damp stone.
I almost laughed at myself, creeping through the dark in my robe like a thief, chasing a voice down to the wine stores.
But the voice didn’t want me in the cellar.