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“Yes, but it never reallyfeltthat way. My mother was the queen, but I was just…” I swallowed down the emotion trying to rise up, shaking my head. “Just a shadow that no one really wanted.”

He blinked, his intense gaze shifting, focusing more fully on me. I fought the urge to squirm, wishing I’d just kept my mouth shut about that last part.

Even if it was irrevocably, painfully true.

Deep down, I think one reason I’d been so desperate to brave the depths of what I’d believed was Hell was so that my kingdom might remember me as somethingotherthan a nuisance. I wanted to prove myself worthy of being seen. Of existing as something more than a mere shadow blocking the light of my parents’ reign. And then I could have died here, even, and maybe left a legacy worth something. Yes; a very real part of me had been willing—maybe evenready—to die here.

Now I was being asked tolive, instead, and to bring life to an entire dying world?

A much scarier prospect, somehow.

Aleksander’s usual grumpy expression had melted into something softer—but clearly uncertain. He didn’t respond to my painful admission, though he looked like he was searching for a way to do so; I half-expected him to offer me an awkward pat on the head and wish me good luck with my feelings.

Praise the gods, he did neither of these things—he merely watched me with that uncertain concern for a long moment before he cleared his throat and said, “You’re bleeding.”

“Hm?”

“Your shoulder.”

“Oh.” I looked, and he was right; the bandages wrapped around it were soiled, dampened enough that the blood had started to leach through the sleeves of my shirt. I tried to wave it off, but he stubbornly beckoned for me to follow him over to the vanity, where a fresh bowl of water had been left by someone, along with healing supplies; Aveline had intended to redress this wound in addition to bringing food, it seemed.

I didn’t particularly wanteitherof them to tend to my wounds, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue for once. So, I let Aleksander work while I fixed my eyes on the bit of courtyard I could see through the half-drawn curtains.

I tried not to think about his touch.

But it was impossible not to.

It was light. Precise. Perfectly clinical. But as he shifted my shirt out of his way to better assess the bandaged wound underneath, I couldn’t block out the flood of vivid memories—images of the last time he’d skimmed his fingertips along my skin. The moments spent together in that loft in Erebos. The way his touch had explored me so hungrily, so confidently. The heat and magic that had risen between us…

I was holding my breath, I realized—and for a moment, so was he.

Was he remembering it all, too?

How…unfinishedwe’d left things?

It had felt wrong in Erebos. But now, everything had changed. Again. His touch felt familiar, and yet altogether new, the connection between us relentlessly shifting, forever threatening to knock me off my feet…but suddenly, there was a part of me that didn’t completely hate the idea of being swept off balance by him. At least he was an enemy Iknew.

And, at the moment, he didn’t feel like an enemy at all.

“They told me you didn’t leave my side the entire time I was unconscious,” I said, quietly, as he snapped out of the stillness that had overtaken us and went back to his precise re-bandaging efforts.

“…It’s a large palace. It seemed simpler to stay put.” His voice was frustratingly flat. Guarded.

“Simpler?”

“Yes.”

I huffed out a laugh. “Nothing about us issimple,Aleks.”

He didn’t reply. He finished redressing my wound in complete silence, and then he crossed to the other side of the room, gathering up his coat that was draped over a velvet-trimmed settee. His gaze was distant; I could only guess at what he was thinking.

I shouldn’t have wanted to know.

I had plenty of my own thoughts to worry about.

“You came back for me in Erebos,” I heard myself say.

“And?”