Chapter Thirty-Four
I come to in my room in Morta’s Lair, the silk of the sheets beneath my fingertips.
It takes me a moment to orient my mind, to remember what last happened.
The memories come quick.
The sunset, gilding the waves of his hair.
His lips, soft on mine.
Rain, glittering.
Stained glass.
Steaming water.
Then—
My father.
Blood. An injured Gustav.
Me, trying to run, to get back to them—
I’m moving before I think better of it, my vision awash in smears of light. I grab for the wall, the doorframe, letting it clear, and then I rip open the door to Anton’s room.
Empty.
Heart pounding, I race through his wing, then across the bridge. What was Anton thinking, forcing me back here? Does he think I won’t return? Fool.
Then another realization sends a stutter into my heart.
I don’t know how long it’s been. From what I can tell, it’s evening, but has a day passed or mere hours? Has the deadline come and gone?
My body begs to collapse by the time I reach the tunnel leading through the mountain and into Moranya’s Citadel—only to find it guarded.
“Let me pass,” I say to the Aegis. Three of them stand there, hands clasped around their reaper’s axes. They don’t so much as look at me. But when I try to press through them, I’m shoved back. “You are not to enter. His Gloriousness’s orders.”
Oh, the way rage boils within me. I shake with it. Bunch my fists, my fury fueling my resolve to wring his neck, shake the care out of him.
With a groan, I pivot. March back through the palace, resolute on finding him. Screaming at him, for all the good it would do. But as I pass through the halls, weariness clings.
I failed to bring Anton back to himself. To convince him to act.
And yet…I saw it. I saw how much he cares, despite his denial.
I search for him—through each level. All the places I’ve found him before—deep in his cups, laughing the night away.
But he isn’t there. He isn’t in the gardens or the pavilion.
I could check the roof, but my body is ready to give out with each step.
After being in the land of the living, everything is once again heavy, the pressure painful.
I want to lie down, give up. But then I think of Gustav, of Laurent, of all my friends and how this war will destroy everything. It pushes me onward, offering the illusion of strength where there is none, and I climb one more set of stairs, never mind that it hurts to breathe.
“Vasalie?”
Dizzy, I spin on my heel—foolishly so when the world tilts. But then Sundar is there, gripping my arm. “Fates, where have you been?”
I collapse in his arms. Mercifully, he catches me with an arm under mine, and, seeing that I’m breathless, he shepherds me down the hallway leading to his room.
There I tell him everything about our time in Ansa.
The workshop, the sketchbook. How fruitless our quest was, and how I placed my hope in Anton after that.
I even admit to the night we spent. I tell Sundar what Anton told me: that he promised fidelity.
And how I told him that I loved him in turn. How he tore my heart out, after that.
The last bit of determination I have whittles away when I speak it all aloud.
“Hope is lost, Sundar,” I breathe, my palms falling open as if dropping the last of it.
“Never. We still have one day. The Syndicate meeting is tomorrow. And Anton is in love with you, Vasalie. Everything you told me proves it further. Give him another chance. Go to him one last time,” Sundar says, shoving the last modicum of hope I’d dropped back into my hands.
I blow out a breath. “I have to find him first.”
The day I woke in Razam and found Anton’s memories lost, I made a vow to believe in him. To save him. Since then, he has kept me close. Safe. He’s shown me who he is—his inherent goodness, even after he thought everyone betrayed him.
He is running away from everything he loves because he is afraid. Afraid of being betrayed, of not being loved at his best—and at his worst.
He is afraid that I see him fully, the way no one else has.
Go to him one last time, Sundar said.
Hours have passed and the sky has dimmed, the aurora an array of purples and blues. Late evening, by the look of it, the soirées in full swing.
He has to return to his bedroom sooner or later.
It takes me far longer than it should to cross the bridge back to his wing of the palace. But as I near his room, a peculiar noise slows my steps. Almost like…talking.
Then I notice his doors are parted.
Warily, I approach, a sick feeling in my stomach. But before I can so much as peer inside, a form pushes through, the door nearly swinging into my face.
Then Dahlia is there, a wrapped sheet slanting across her figure.
It takes me a moment to realize what I am seeing, my eyes tracking each detail—her body nude as the day she was born beneath that sheet. Her cheeks are flushed, red as cherries, her tousled hair falling across her bare left breast.
Her smirk tilts upward when she notices me. “You had him for long enough. Time to share, dancer.”
It hits me, what I’ve just walked in on.
What I barely missed.
I feel very far from my body, even as I turn to run.
I don’t know where I am going, only that I cannot breathe.
He slept with her, when last night he was promising me fidelity. The moon, even, if I had asked. But then I asked for his hand, and he rejected me.
Stars spin in trails across my vision. My shoulders slam into the wall next to the stairs, then I right myself, run harder.
The pain is unbearable from the hours of exertion, the grief now making its way through my nerves; my body will soon give out.
I welcome it, so long as I escape his wing.
Crossing the bridge with fringed vision, I skip down the stairs until I emerge onto the pavilion that leads out toward the waterfall. The pool we swam in.
The pool.
I don’t think, don’t bother to shed my dress.
I dive, desperate for any relief from the way my ribs beg to collapse and crush what’s left of my heart.
I am desperate for solace, too—desperate to get away from the music of the soirées, the souls occasionally flitting by.
I make it under the waterfall, pushing through the curtain of rushing water, and float in the quiet behind it, underneath the cave.
At least here, it’s as if the tears aren’t falling when water carries them away before they can land. The darkness, too, is a balm.
The pressure on my bones releases just enough for me to breathe again, except that in this moment, I don’t want to. I close my eyes, floating still, and yet all I can see is Dahlia at his door, grinning a triumphant grin.
I am trapped here. Trapped in Moranya’s Lair, in love with its ruler, and utterly unwanted. I ruined everything by proposing. He told me straight that he had no wish for attachments. But after all he said, I hoped…
I hoped. And perhaps that was the problem.
Suddenly, the relief of the pool is no longer comforting. I swim toward the rocks that lead into the cave itself, except I don’t seem to have the strength to pull myself out of the water, even as I try, straining with all my might. A defeated breath spills from my lips.
Then an arm comes around me, lifting me up—up alongside a hard, solid form. I yelp, gripping for purchase, but I realize it’s Anton, pulling us both from the water.
Carefully, he nudges me onto a soft slope of rock angled gently into the pool. He turns me so that my back is pressed against it—so that I’m forced to stare up at him.
He heaves breath overtop of me. Meanwhile I glare at him, anger congealing inside my chest, like the smoke of a catching flame. He forced me away from Miridran—ran from his people. Dragged me away, not bothering to talk to me. Not bothering, not bothering, not bothering.
He all but declined my proposal, as if I’d offered him a scrape of mud from my boot.
He rejected me.
He forced me here and left me alone to steep in my failure.
And yet he’s here, bracketing me with his arms. “Vasalie—”
I shove at his bare chest. Again, again. I can’t stop. I’m so furious with him I’m dizzy with it. “You abandoned your people and then you abandoned me!” I resort to pounding, my fists balled—
He takes my wrists captive in a single hand, raises them above my head. Pins them there.
My gaze locks on his, my breath fuming. My hair leaks trails of water down my shoulders.
“You slept with her,” I heave.
“I slept with who?”
I huff, his play at ignorance all the more infuriating. “Dahlia. I saw her wrapped in your sheets, Anton.” Again I try to jerk my arms free and fail spectacularly, all for him to lean in, his voice a hiss.
“You think you have the right to be angry, yet you decided it wasn’t pertinent for me to know that you were in league with my brother. You danced on his stage for years. Fates, you were infatuated with him, and you never breathed a word.”
I can’t refute that. I can’t even explain. My lips are bound, sealed to the past, and yet—
“How—how did you even find out?” I manage.
He leans in, his jaw angled just above my mouth as if he might bite. “Still no answers, then?”
My hands, fisted, clench harder, my inhales choppy as the storm-strewn sea.
“You are one to talk, Your Gloriousness. You would prefer to rot here rather than do what you know you ought. You desperately want to be loved, but you’re too much of a coward to look it in the eye!
You reek of fear, and it’s such a pity.”
His stare is cold and blazing emerald like shards of severed sea glass.
Tears trail down my cheeks, my throat tight with them. “I love you,” I say, the sound anguished, “and you slept with her.”
“Vasalie,” he says again, his chest heaving. “Dahlia sought me out. I refused her.”
You had him for long enough. Time to share, dancer.
But he didn’t, he hadn’t…
And yet—
“You left me,” I continue. “You—you rejected me.”
His lips hover atop mine. “And yet I’m here.”
My response tangles in my throat, the plethora of emotions stuck deep in my diaphragm impeding the air I’m desperately struggling to breathe.
“I don’t know what to do,” I pant. “With you. With anything.”
“Be with me.”
I blink up at him. “What?”
“Be with me. Tonight.”
“But I…” My windpipe closes on a swallow. “I am so angry with you. I—”
“Tomorrow we will argue. About all of it. We will sort everything out. I promise you that.”
“But you said—”
“You,” he cuts in, “have driven me mad. Mad with all the ways I want to punish you, please you. You occupy every corner of my mind, every chamber of my heart, and I am tortured because of it. I have never wanted someone so much in my life.” Another breath, this one weighted.
He touches his forehead to mine, a prayer on his lips.
“Be with me, Vasalie. I need to make you understand what I feel for you.”
The tears have dried somewhat, and only now do I see him more clearly.
He’s shaking, flushed. Disheveled, like a ship tossed about by a relentless storm.
I’m shaking, too, though not from the cold.
Here it’s irrevocably warm and humid, the both of us still heaving puffs of mist, our bodies soaking wet.
Yet there’s something different about him. About his eyes, the way he’s looking at me. Not recognition, exactly, but something…else.
I need to make you understand what I feel for you.
My battered heart still holds my breath captive; only little slips of air sneak in. But I lift my hands. Set them on either side of his jaw.
And like all the reckless things I have done, I pull his mouth to mine.