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Chapter Twenty-Eight

B y the time we make it back into the tunnels, I’m so weary I can hardly stand.

I follow Anton until my legs crumple beneath me. Then I feel myself being scooped up and carried, but only for a moment until my vision blots and I see no more.

Only when he slides open a pane in the tunnel wall, a lambent glow falling over me, do I come to. I glance about as he sets me gently on my feet, somehow knowing to wait before releasing me so that I do not fall.

“Your wing,” I breathe. “No—I must return to my room. If he finds that I’m missing . . .”

“It would be far more dangerous if he hears of you sneaking back to your room the very hour he himself returns from the brothel.”

I blow out a breath. He’s right.

He tugs me along, guiding me to a guest room off a branching hallway. “You can sleep here.”

So matter of fact. “Someone will see me in the morning, surely.”

“In the morning,” he says, “I can create enough of a distraction that you can slip back out undetected. I’m rather good at that.”

Exhaustion rakes over me again, so I merely nod and slump on the bed.

The room is small and windowless, alabaster stone wrapping the walls aside from a painting or two.

At least the bed is soft and pillowy. Anton tells me he will have someone send me breakfast in the morning and that we will figure the rest out after that. I barely hear him, already half asleep.

This time, I dream of a throne.

It is familiar. A pillar of carved stone filigreed with iron, set high on a dais before which I stand. But try as I might, I cannot see who sits upon it. So I turn.

And forget that I am dreaming.

Gore paints the room in shreds of red and black, blood thick as tar smeared across the floor. I trip over my heels as I stumble back, only to hit a wall of glass. I try another route, but the same glass blocks me on all sides, caging me in—

I throw myself against it, but it doesn’t budge. I kick and claw, but it only shrinks until I can’t move at all.

A prison.

No.

I splay my hands, glancing about for any sign of help. Beyond the horror, doors open to flitting figures. A battle. A war. Spears are thrown. Axes swing past. Heads are severed, and I cannot, cannot get free, the blood about my cage rising like a flood—

I don’t know where I am.

I wrench forward, only to slip, my legs splayed beneath me. And I am bound, cocooned in fabric that sticks to my sweat-slicked skin like glue. The air is stale. Hot. Unmoving. My heart riots. I follow the line of the wall, but that too is stone—

A prison.

A cell.

Darkness, shrinking.

I cannot breathe.

I cannot breathe.

Panic swings me into full hysteria. I claw forward, wrestling against whatever it is that clings to me, until I find a faint sliver of light like a crack in the wall. I scamper toward it, shove my fingers into the gap, pull—

A door. It’s a door. I manage to pry it open, then I’m spilling outward, into some unknown hall, my equilibrium tilting like a wave-thrown ship.

I knock into a plinth, the vase atop shattering across the floor, but I need air.

I stumble on, the tile cold against my feet. Dimly, I hear someone calling my name.

The voices. Always the voices.

I collide with something hard.

“Minnow?”

I try to look up, but the rhythm of my panting sends a swirl of stars across my sight.

“Vasalie,” says a voice, soothing, soft. A voice I know. “I need you to do something for me. It will sound strange, but it will help. I need you to breathe in and tell me what you smell. Give me three words for it.”

I shake my head, because he doesn’t understand—

“Trust me,” he says.

With no short amount of frustration, I turn my focus to the scent corralling me.

“Warmth,” I rasp. Musk. Something else I can’t name. “Clove.” But my chest grows tight, as if it’s about to cave.

My weight rocks sideways, but strong arms catch me. I feel myself being hauled up, carried—

Quivering curtains slink back, then a vortex of sea-kissed air whisks about, tossing my hair. I’m settled onto a wide balustrade, one hand cupping my waist. The other settles against my cheek, and only then do I feel the line of tears tracking down my face.

“Let’s try it here. Something else, now. Tell me five things you can touch. Describe them.”

Dimly, I understand what he’s doing.

Use all your senses when the pain is at its worst, Brigitte had told me. Maybe—maybe it will work with this, too.

“The stone beneath me,” I say, shaking my head. “The wind.”

“And?”

And I can’t concentrate anymore, can’t—

He takes my hands in his. Puts them to his chest. “What do you feel, Vasalie?”

The silk of his nightshirt. The zigzag of its golden hem, rough beneath my fingertips. The sturdy planes beneath. I press harder in my desperation, then flatten my palms.

“Your heartbeat,” I breathe.

“Tell me more. Four words for it.”

“It’s . . . slow. Steady,” I force out. I squeeze my eyes shut, narrowing my focus to my hands, to what I feel. He’s so . . . “Solid, and firm.”

Heat builds beneath my cheeks, my heart easing its pace.

“Tell me three things you see.”

I open my eyes.

“ You. ”

He quirks a soft smile. “What else?”

But I can’t look away. His gaze transports me somewhere . . . else. Somewhere mythical, a place that only exists in my dreams—or perhaps far beyond even those. Because there is something so very unreal about him. As if he might vanish beneath my touch.

It’s then that I realize my fingers are digging into his shirt.

But I can’t seem to let go, afraid that if I do, I will fall into the world below. The Lair of Morta, perhaps. But maybe I am headed there anyway.

Dark hair whisks about Anton’s face, the pale kiss of moonlight silvering his cheeks. A shiver glides across my arms.

“I am broken,” I say. An admission, or explanation. The only words I can string together.

“You are art,” he says in response.

Once more, I latch on to his gaze, trying to make sense of that. But my mind—

I feel it slipping, feel the weariness settling over me like an unwelcome embrace.

But I am no longer starved for air. Especially now, with a heavy wind whipping past, plunging air into my lungs with ease. My vision clears, the fog of panic dissipating.

“I . . . broke your vase,” I say, tipping my gaze away.

“I hated the thing anyway.”

“You didn’t even see which one.”

“I’m really not fond of vases.”

I let out a huff, allowing my hands to fall. “I can’t go back there.” I don’t care that I’m in the thin, velvet nightdress I had worn into Philam, a mere slip of fabric that now rides all the way up my thighs. But he isn’t looking at that.

He’s looking at me, his verdant eyes limned in starlight.

“I know what it’s like to feel lonely and stifled by the dark.

I should have taken more consideration with the room I gave you.

” He swipes away the tendril of hair plastered to my cheek.

“As it happens, it was the only one with fresh linens, and I can’t risk sending you back to your room just yet.

We have another three hours until dawn.”

Even sitting as I am, I begin to sway. Not from panic now, but exhaustion so deep even my bones ache. “Here. I will stay here.”

“On my balcony? I think not.” He takes my hand and helps me up, guiding me back through sheets of rustling curtains and into the room beyond.

It’s a large, circular expanse plush with rugs, flooded with wavering firelight from a hearth to my right. To my left is a wide, four-poster bed. A duvet sits askew, sheets and pillows strewn about, the ceiling domed and painted like an aurora borealis above.

I turn back to Anton, taking stock of his attire. The silk pants in particular, the way his hair is disheveled, tossed about by the breeze. “I can’t stay here,” I say.

Because this is his bedroom.

“I rather think you should. It’s open, spacious, and the fire lends just enough warmth against the cool nighttime breeze,” he says, moving to kindle the hearth.

I back up, my shoulder blades hitting an armoire, and blurt the first excuse I can think of. “I might be sick. I would ruin your coverlet . . .”

“All the more reason to let me keep an eye on you.”

“You expect me to sleep in your bed.”

“I will not lay a hand on you, Minnow. I swear it on my life.”

I believe him. I do.

But then, why does my throat constrict at the thought? At the prospect of trusting him, of burrowing beneath his sheets, even after what we did in that brothel . . .

I am not afraid of him. So why the fear?

Then my mind snags on the night I found Illian next to my bed, watching me. The way he wanted something I didn’t understand. And Anton—

Anton is his brother.

He watches me now, frowning at the distance I’ve put between us.

Then he grabs a bottle in a drawer beneath the night table.

“This is brazenflower oil.” He dabs several beads on his wrist, and immediately his skin reddens and swells.

“Not a soul knows about this, but I am allergic to it. Of course I’m trying to change that little by little, but I have not yet succeeded. ”

He strides toward the bed, then lugs something from underneath it.

A sword glints, his hand coiled about its hilt.

My breath catches, but then he lacquers oil over it in a generous sweep and places it on the center of the bed, dividing it in two.

“Should I so much as lean your way, one nick with this blade and I am unlikely to survive it.”

I . . . “Why would you do this?”

“Because I am exhausted, and so are you.” He grabs a rag and soap from a washbasin and scrubs his arm, then dims the fire to a subtle glow. “And because you are not the only one with nightmares. Another presence in my room might benefit me, too.”

“Because this is the one night you are deprived of your usual company?” I hedge, making my way toward the bed, opting for the unruffled side. Tentatively, I peel back the covers.

I am decidedly unprepared when he shucks off his nightshirt, the hard cut of his chest glazed under a spill of moonlight. But the distance in his gaze brings me up short.

Guilt corrals me at that. Earlier this night, as long ago as it feels now, he had told me his brother made not one but several attempts on his life.

I know what it’s like to feel lonely and stifled by the dark.

But the shadow disappears a moment later, the light in his eyes returning. “We all have our comforts, Minnow. I wonder if you might be mine.”

I awaken a few hours later as the sun first teases the horizon, a barely visible flush cast upon the sea and sky. And this time, I am at peace.

The soft sound of breathing stirs the air.

Slowly, gingerly, I turn over, still toasty under the warm duvet. Anton’s hair is splayed about the pillow, his lids sealed shut. I withhold a smile when I see the puddle of drool on his pillow, and even more so when a snore pipes through his lips.

We all have our comforts, Minnow. I wonder if you might be mine.

For long moments, I just watch him.

The King of the East is an enigma, my opinion of him shifting every passing day. He is both beloved and despised, admired and envied. Rumors sully him on all sides—rumors that, if they are to be believed, say he is no better than his brothers.

And yet he laid that sword between us.

I wonder if anyone truly knows him at all.

I wonder, too, if his kindness, real or not, might be what breaks me in the end.

Tentatively, I ease up. Take its hilt in my palm.

I lift it from between us and place it on the floor, out of reach, before sliding back into bed. His gesture by placing it there in the first place proved to me I do not need it.