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“Wait.”

He halts, leaving his back to me.

“I’m cold.”

“Then keep moving.” He takes a step.

“I’m wet,” I try, risking another suggestive response from him.

“It’s raining.”

Clueless man. “I’mexhausted.”

He slowly spins around and stares at my dripping body and pleading eyes, his forehead wrinkling.

“I need to rest.”

He takes my arm and starts walking, silent as he steers us toward the mountain’s incline. Thoroughly soggy and shivering, I trek up the hillside without complaint or question, even as we reach solid rock and have to find our footing with each slippery step. He never lets my arm go, and as the last of the gray daylight hides itself beyond the horizon, he lifts me up and lays me flat on a muddy rock ledge before climbing up next to me. I nearly lose myself, staring at the hole carved into the rock wall of the mountain, as deep and dark as his eyes.

Chapter

Forty-Four

“Come on. We’ll sleep in the cave,” Eli says.

That darkness has curled around him all day, but it doesn’t stop me from questioning him anymore. It doesn’t make my skin crawl. I feel it, like a shadow I can’t see, a cool, pressing embrace all around him, in him…in me.

Not bothering to lift my cheek from the rock, I ask, “Is that safe? How did you know this was here?”

“It’s a bit of a family spot.” He looks at the dark entrance behind him. “No one outside my family has ever been here.”

“Your family spot is a cave?”And you’re letting me see it?“Why does that not surprise me?”

He slides his hands under my arms and pulls me to my feet. The mud thins as the rain trickles down my pant legs in brown rivulets.

“Would you rather rest out here?” He doesn’t wait for an answer before taking my ear and moving toward the cave.

I stop short and jerk my head free. “I have a hand you could use.”

At the mischievous glint in his widening eyes, I specify, “Not forthat.”

He pushes the dripping curls from his eyes. “I hurt you?”

“No…It’s just not what people do.”

He waits, staring, as if I’m holding back a better explanation. I’m not.

His hand goes to his own ear. “I’m not like other people.”

No, you’re not. And neither am I.I look up at him, blinking the rain from my eyes.

He reaches back out and slowly takes my ear again. His cold fingers slide over the wetness, and he doesn’t let up on his deep stare as he tugs me one step, and another, walking backward, gently guiding me out of the rain.

“And I like your ears,” he says.

I can’t find a scrap of anger in me at this precise moment, and I’m rummaging through my feelings in a frenzy trying to find some.

I’m mesmerized the second we’re inside. Our wet clothes drip onto the cave floor, each drop echoing. The curved walls are midnight blue, covered in names written in an elegant, swirly script. Thousands of names, crafted with shimmering white letters, much like, if not exactly like, the writing on the notes Eli left for me each day in the castle. The names twinkle on the blue background, everywhere the moonlight reaches, as though they’ve been written with stardust.