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13

††††††

The rain began to fall an hour ago.

The soothing putter patter of the droplets hitting the paned windows almost lulled me into a sleep, but I startle as the flames in the hearth flash blue.

I sit against the wall, in the same spot Daxeel left me in before the rain started; when he kissed a tender touch to my mouth, then let his fingers slip from my jaw; when he drew back with a step and watched the blankness of my face crumble into something ugly and hollow.

Then he listened as I released a cold, clanging scream.

He didn’t stay another heartbeat.

As I slid down the wall and thudded to my bum on the cold hardwood floor, he stalked out of the study—

And left me here to cry.

So I cry I did. Sobbed myself ragged. Suppose I started to drift off sometime after the rain began, and almost found a deprived slumber.

But the flash of blue flames tugs me out of my trance.

I peel myself off the floor.

Dinner should come shortly. Maybe now. I don’t know. My mind is a chugging bog, it’s lost deep in fog, and I’m stumbling around blind.

Mindlessly, my stocking-clad feet drag over the floors of Hemlock. They scrape up the stairs and down corridors. And they take me to the solitude of my bedchamber.

I lock myself away.

14

††††††

I scream.

I scream until my throat is ragged and all I have left in me are silent sobs.

I rot in my bed.

15

the night Daxeel first doubted Nari

††† TEN YEARS EARLIER †††

It was one week after I first met this vicious female that I laid the thorny roses at the foot of the lattice. Her window is levels above, but in the nights I watched from the shadows of the woods, I realized how often she climbs down that very lattice once her household is asleep.

Sometimes, she sneaks off to meet my cousin, Eamon, or to drink that sugar-syrup she calls honeywine in the fields. One night, I lost her scent.

I still don’t know where she disappeared to in these thinning woods. She simply vanished.

But the night I laid out the roses for her, it feels a decade ago, if it ever happened at all. Now that I have her, back against the harsh bark of the willow tree, my mouth traversing the curve of her neck, it feels as though she has always been mine.

I am no stranger to emotion. Rage, compassion, two opposite ends of a rope, and I hold both. My father’s treatment of my mother, of my sister; those memories have seared into me and forged steel. I have lived as a shield.

Around Nari, something else grows. Something new.

She found a bud of tenderness that exists within me, foreign, and took it into her cold, killer hands.