Chapter Twenty
I look at him, and I ponder how I’ve managed to refuse him thus far. How I haven’t curled into his sheets if only to drink in the scent of him. To feel close, and wanted, and warm.
I accept his hand when he reaches to pull me up—only to panic when I learn of his intended destination. “What do you mean there’re no steps required?” The pool outside at the base of the waterfall is at least thirty, maybe forty, stories below.
His dimples make for a rather disarming appearance. “Trust me, will you?”
A moment later, I understand when he leads me into a small enclosure behind a gold-hammered door in the hallway just beside his room. Glass cocoons the space in its entirety, which is barely wide enough to fit us both. My chin juts toward him when he slides the door shut, then pulls a lever—
We begin to descend.
“A lift,” he tells me. “Much more convenient than stairs.”
Another impressive feat of this place, thanks to Moranya’s power.
“A shame mortals haven’t invented the like,” he muses.
Perhaps you should, I refrain from saying. Yet I can’t seem to focus on anything beyond our proximity, the way he’s almost pressed up against me.
The enclosure speeds slightly and my stomach hitches into my throat. He presses an arm to a rail above my head, the position so similar to how he’d leaned over me underneath a flowering willow all those months ago.
“It’s safe,” he says, grinning down at me.
“Right,” I breathe, holding on to his gaze for the bravery it affords me. The ground rising to meet us through the glass floor is disconcerting and slightly terrifying.
But all that fades to the background when he doesn’t lift his gaze from mine. And when his lips lose their smile, I no longer see the blur of the mountain. Or the waterfall just behind him.
I feel his breath ghost over me.
Warmth sizzles in my belly, threatening to turn my knees into water. His eyes drag a line down the column of my throat, his dark, ridiculously long lashes casting spokes of shadow.
You promised you would not touch me, I want to say.
I want him to break that promise, I admit to myself.
I swallow thickly.
I can’t allow myself to think like this.
But the way he watches me now…It’s as if he’s been shocked into stillness. Like I’m a conundrum. A gadget laid bare and fractured on his worktable, and he is searching how best to reassemble it. To reassemble me.
It’s as if he’s searching for who I really am—even if he doesn’t know it.
Oh, how I wish I could walk into his mind and weave the threads that connected us back together again.
Another rattle and clank, and the door pops open.
“Come,” he says, taking my hand and exiting the lift.
It deposits us onto the walkway leading right up to the waterfall, the gush of it roaring through my ears. There are other figures in the pool—lithe slips of skin gliding in and out of the water. Laughter bounces about. Lights bob in the air, fanning soft glows across the rippling pool.
I follow Anton down the slope to the right, where a large patch of moss lies amid a gathering of rocks. It’s more secluded than the rest, but not secluded enough for my liking. There he shucks off his robe, then his shirt and pants, leaving him in only a pair of thin breeches.
He is paler than he was on the isle, what with the lack of a real sun.
Still, there’s something about his complexion that feels gilded, as if he were encased in citrine.
Even the smooth, rigid planes of his stomach and chest hold a sheen that’s all his, whereas mine is in danger of fading; the water will wash the shine from my skin.
Still, I can’t help the way my eyes cling to him. The hands I long to hold. The arms I’d give anything to curl into.
“I vowed not to defile you,” he says, noticing the way I’m standing like a tree, rooted. “So join me for a quick swim. The water should do wonders for your muscles. It will take the pressure off and help with the pain.”
Of course he noticed. And he’s right. I imagine it will help, yet I can’t seem to move. Unclothed, he will see all of me—my scars, the patches of reddened skin, the steep, exaggerated curve of my spine. So many imperfections, unlike his souls.
“I am not in swimming attire, Sire,” I rasp. “I—I think I will just watch from here.”
“Vastianna.”
“Vasalie,” I say without thinking, just under my breath.
At that, he cocks his head.
For a moment, I think perhaps it’s triggered a memory, but then he asks, “A nickname?”
“Something like that.”
If anything, Vasalie feels more fitting to who I am. Who he knew me as.
Or perhaps it’s that Vastianna represents the heiress, the daughter who must face down her father and help save the world. There’s still a part of me that feels afraid of her.
“You have underthings, Vasalie,” he says. “I can see their outline. Those will suffice, will they not?”
I rifle through my mind, searching for any excuse, but none comes.
With a heavy sigh, I peel off my costume, unbuttoning it at the nape of my neck and slipping my arms free.
I leave on the dark band covering my breasts—which keeps his pendant secure—and shivers coast over me as I draw down the leggings.
My matching undershorts are even thinner, slanting across my backside.
But I feel bare of any clothes at all when he scrapes his gaze over me, his green eyes far too vivid in the low light, cutting through the mist like a swath of sun.
So nervous am I that I don’t notice whether the other souls are watching, my breath captive within the bars of my chest.
I wait for him to wince, to look away in disinterest.
I wait for shame to rise within me, to fill my lungs until I can scarcely breathe.
Instead the line of his throat bobs just once before he dives into the water.
I approach a portion of rock that forms a set of natural steps. Testing the first step, I find the water surprisingly warm and inviting, even amid the cool spray bouncing from its surface at the waterfall’s plunging descent.
While water is unsurprisingly heavier here, thicker somehow in this place, so too is it comforting, like being wrapped in an embrace. A reprieve from those persistent chills. I draw in a lungful of humid air, then exhale a long, relieved breath.
I used to love swimming. Illian had ponds in his palace, just beyond the gardens outside my apartments before my imprisonment. Yet the last time I swam—
It was when Illian threw me into the depths of the sea after I had murdered King Rurik.
My chest tightens, his name like a thumb digging into the pulse point of my neck.
I have yet to see him here. I wonder what echelon he belongs to, if I still might come across him. But the palace is vast—and even more vast is the city that stretches for miles and miles beyond, and the Sands that ripple outward from them into a sea as black and glossy as a hematite stone.
For once, I am grateful for the detachment Moranya imparts upon her souls.
A moment later, Anton surfaces, frowning at my expression. So I scrub my thoughts and lift my feet, sinking until my shoulders dip beneath the waterline.
“You were far away just now,” he says. “I want to know where you went.”
Water ripples around us, wafts of steam curling about. I can’t tell him; such is the curse. Before I have a chance to respond, though, a voice interrupts.
“Your Gloriousness!”
Anton’s head jerks to the right. Dahlia is swimming our way, gliding through the water in smooth, steady strokes. When she comes up for air, she splashes a wave of water at him, a delighted giggle bursting from her throat. He laughs, returning her spray with one of his own.
And suddenly I wonder why I am here.
This feels irrevocably foolish. Pointless. A frustrated growl knots in my throat, but I swallow it down and wade toward the edge of the pool—
“Oh, no you don’t,” Anton says, his breath feathering my ear. Warm hands settle on my shoulders, and then he’s spinning me around. “You agreed to a quick swim.”
“I swam, it was quick, and now I’m going to bed,” I announce.
Behind Anton, Dahlia swims up to curl an arm around his waist. “Oh, let her sleep. I’ll show you a good time. I always do.”
“Another time, darling,” he says, snatching my hand now that I’m pulling away again.
Her face scrunches, and she slants a gaze my way. Then, with a solitary exhale, she croons, “You know where to find me when you get bored.”
Bored with me. The thought curdles, but I breathe through it as she wanders away, pulling herself from the pool entirely.
“You didn’t have to send her away,” I murmur.
“We had an agreement,” he states simply, folding his arms. “You have questions for me. I have some for you, too. Starting with…Who are you really?”
The question catches me off guard. “What do you mean?”
“You are not Miridranian, as we established,” he states, referencing our dinner.
He wades around me, a finger on his chin.
“You have a stepmother who was murdered, if I caught your meaning in the Abyssal. You went on to live in my country. You became a performer—a dancer, I gather. How I have never heard of you, I cannot comprehend.”
I twist my soaked curls into a coil with my fingers, spinning so that I’m facing him as he moves. “Surely you can’t expect me to recount my life’s story tonight.”
But oh, how I wish I could.
He pauses and plucks a nearby reed sprouting from between the rocks and plops the end into his mouth to chew. “Did you dance in my court?”
“No, Sire.” Not in Ansa, at least.
“Then where?”
But I can’t tell him—even if the curse allows it. He’s already suspicious of me, and if he knew I served Illian, that I was his Jewel…Illian, whom he still remembers as the brother who tried to murder him…
My voice comes out scraped. “I prefer not to speak of my past.”
“Because you are hiding more than you let on?”
“I am hiding a past that I am ashamed of, Majesty,” I say. “Would you really make me relive it here and now?”
He pulls his bottom lip between his teeth, observing me with a tilt of his head. “You really were a miscreant, weren’t you?”