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He runs that hand on my shoulder up the back of my neck and grips a fistful of my hair, pulling me closer. “Your guard, Elivander.”

Chapter

Five

Boots shuffle on stone, and a light rain raps outside. Consciousness greets me with the same hammering headache I left it with, my body punishing me for the lack of coffee.

Elivander heads toward the door, solid obsidian like the walls and ceiling and floor, the only way out of this black box. I notice it’s missing right away—that dark aura around him, the taste in my mouth, the crawling sensation on my neck. It’s gone. As if it faded away with the dark of night.

Maybe I imagined it, conjured it up like a vision. But in its place, a sense of light emanates from him. It pulls me in as if he weren’t the man I wanted to strangle last night. My body warms despite the cold and lack of clothes, and I’m hit with the crispscent of gentle wind before a storm.Just my mind messing with me.

“You’re leaving?” I ask, tapping my rings on the floor. A pit forms in my stomach over who might come in his place. I survived the night, but that might not be the case with someone else.

He turns, his gaze dropping to my curled up body on the floor. His lips twirl. “Don’t worry about missing me. I’ll be back after my other shift.” He cuffs his sleeves as he talks, revealing inch after inch of toned arms. “You’ll have a day shift guard, so don’t bother trying anything.”

I push myself up, my muscles locking. “I’mnotgoing to miss you. And why do I need a guard if I’m locked in this damn room?”

“Because in over two centuries, we haven’t had a single intruder enter Sonnet. You think the Centress will risk you escaping?”

“I didn’tintrude. I was abducted by a madman.”

He laughs and runs a hand through his curls. “A guard. And his report says you were found on Sonnet’s side of the border.”

“Well, he’s a liar.”

He shoves his hands in his pockets. “No one would want to bring Hollows into Sonnet. He has no reason to lie…but you do.”

“I don’t even know what Sonnet is, or Hollows. Or a Centress.”

“Sonnet is the realm that borders Caldera to the north, and the Centress rules it.” He pulls his hands free. “I don’t have time for this.”

Another realm. I was right. “But what about Hollows? What are those?”

He points a finger at me as he opens the heavy door, stone scraping over stone. “Stay,” he commands, then slips out, taking the warmth and suspicious impression of light with him.

“Where the fuck would I go?” I yell as the door falls shut.

Cold rubs against my nerves and cuts into my skin. Clothes would help. Food would help. And Kelter’s heat. But I only have my own icy limbs to hug me, to attempt to soothe the ache, the one that settles deep inside me, as though all the shivering shook the cold into my core.

Nights at my sixtieth-something foster home were always cold. It was partly because it was winter when I lived there, and partly because all the beds, couches and blankets were already taken by the other seven parentless raging adolescents. So I slept on the floor. I got used to the rigid wood against my back or side, but I never got used to the cold. It seeped into my very being, a painful, muscle-tensing cold, and I’m not sure it ever fully left. It froze my trust—in others…and in myself.

I tried to burn it away, or maybe there was more to it than the cold.

Reggie Junior, the only biological child in the house, took to sleeping on the floor with me. He started on the other side of the room and maneuvered his way across over the course of a week, his sticky teenage skin and hungry green eyes closer every night.

He smelled like man-sweat and feet, and the first time he touched me I gagged and tried to escape, but that didn’t keep him away. He whispered his nasty little thoughts in my ear and dug his hand down my underwear. By the end of the month, I was spreading my legs for him every night, letting him ram my back into the cold wood while the others slept, or pretended to. I loved it. And hated it.

Two weeks later, conveniently timed by him when I stood four feet away, he announced to his friends that he’d won the bet—that I wasn’t contagious, that fucking me wouldn’t cause them to have “attacks” like me. He offered me up to them in lieu of payment, but fortunately for them, they all chose to pay up. That same night I buried my trust so deep it turned to ice. I packedmy bag, snagged a few things I’d had my eye on and set Reggie Junior’s house on fire.

Hiding behind a parked car and watching him run outside in his saggy white underwear in the middle of the night may have been the best moment of my life.

Until I watched the house burn down.

The flames licked that house like he licked me, and that cold, hard wooden floor crackled and popped like fireworks. Smoke swirled above, laughing into the starry night.

That was the last family I stayed with. Cam, the only person I could trust as a child, hugged and scolded me for a week straight. After that I was on my own, free at the ripe age of sixteen. I quit school, left the area and never saw Reggie or Cam again.

That raw coldness, that burning, they complement and destroy each other, like light and dark, trust and betrayal.