Page 58 of Fractured (Royal Sins #3)

“Wake up, wake up, Rune, look at me,” I said, and there was movement behind me, and shouts and calls, but I didn’t turn. I just continued to kiss him and beg him to open his eyes.

Shimmer on his lips.

Silvery white, identical to Vair’s fur, and it stuck to his lips every time I kissed him, then disappeared as if his skin absorbed it.

I couldn’t tell you how long I remained there or how many times I called his name, but someone up there, god or star, must have felt my desperation because Rune blinked.

Everything came to a halt for me. My ears were suddenly deaf to whatever was happening behind me, and I was sucked into this bubble with only Rune.

I heard the sharp intake of breath, the hiss of the air slipping between his parted lips.

I saw his pupils dilating when he opened his eyes wide, and they were dark and bloodshot—but he saw me.

Rune saw me. He was definitely alive.

Everything came back to me at once.

“ Move! ” Rune said, and he pulled his arms toward himself with his jaws locked tightly.

His shirt tore further, and the shadows turned the sleeves of it into fucking ashes that fell to the floor, and the ones holding back his right arm let go, cracked and disappeared like they were made of fucking concrete at one point .

I jumped to my feet, no longer freezing, my blood rushing, my eyes wide open—to find soldiers coming closer, three of them, though they weren’t charging yet.

I turned to see where the king was, and?—

He was right behind me. Fuck.

His fingers wrapped around my neck and his wide eyes filled my vision. They were darker than the rest of his face, indeed, and then I was moving.

Someone called my name. The sound of metal on metal came from a distance, but all I could focus on was that face. I’d instinctively wrapped my hands around his wrist, and I was trying to breathe while he pushed me back, farther and farther away, until there was nowhere else to go.

Shadows against my back.

His fingers squeezed and I choked, tried to draw in air, to drown the terror that had taken over me, to think.

Think, Nilah, think!

Except what was there to think about other than the fact that this man was now going to strangle the life out of me?

God, he looked so much like Rune, but also so different. His nose was rounder, his eyes only a deep navy without a hint of silver in them, his beard smooth and dark, covering his jaws completely.

He was big, too, bulkier than Rune, his shoulders wider, his hair the same mess. But you could absolutely see that they were related. They looked the same age, too, except for the eyes.

These eyes had seen a lot more. These eyes had years in them, centuries.

These eyes were mirrors to a deeply disturbed soul.

“What have you done, Veyra? What have you done?! ”

The words left his lips that I could barely see from his beard in a whisper.

When they registered, even my heart stopped beating.

Shivers spread all over my skin and with them came the magic.

With them came the frostfire, sharp as it traveled down my arms once more, and my hands were lit up again.

Not just that, but that same silvery white that could have been some kind of actual frost that I’d left all over Rune, clung to the sleeve of his shirt.

He looked at it, the king, in a way that said he still refused to believe his own eyes.

I am not Veyra! I screamed the words in my head over and over, but I couldn’t breathe well enough to say them, and his fingers were so tight, nearly crushing my windpipe, disabling my vocal cords completely…

“When he told me, I didn’t believe it,” he said, and his voice was not like Rune’s at all.

His was thick, heavy, dark—and it fit the look of his eyes perfectly. The voice of a man who’d said too many bad— awful— things he could never take back.

“I didn’t believe it, but here you are,” he continued, and I was trying so hard to speak, struggling to break free, but his grip must have been made of iron.

His fingers didn’t budge, and neither did his arm, no matter how much of that magic coming out of me spread onto his skin, slipped under the black sleeve of the jacket he was wearing.

“You shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have, Veyra—you knew I’d have to end it! I would never let it happen— you knew !”

No more air going down to my lungs.

For a second, the king froze, and behind him I saw movement. I saw shadows and soldiers wearing black armor plates, and I saw Rune—he was standing. He was fighting next to Raja. He was calling my name, I thought— Hang on, Wildcat, hang on!

But I couldn’t.

The frostfire was being drowned by the panic, by the fact that I was seconds away from death for real.

It wasn’t stopping him, it wasn’t freezing him, that magic that constantly came out of my fingers, though I could have sworn his hand had become ice-cold.

I could have sworn his skin had turned almost blue—he still wasn’t letting go of me.

Those eyes.

The Midnight King came closer. The darkness over his eyes lifted all the way like a veil.

“ Why would you make me watch you die twice?”

The words were like knives cutting right through me. Forget breathing—I was already dead in the moment that followed. It felt like I was not inside a body at all. It felt like I wasn’t me.

I was her.

There were no words to explain what came over me, what came from both outside and from the center of me, but my lips moved, and I had voice—voice that sounded like mine but wasn’t—to utter a single word. A name.

“ Helem.”

Only when I heard the name out loud did I remember that I’d heard it once before—from Raja in the chambers of the seer. Even so, it wasn’t me who said it. I was certain of it, it wasn’t me.

The king closed his eyes, and he was suddenly shaking. The raw pain that flashed on his face, the way he gritted his teeth and squeezed shut his eyes, would forever remain in my memory.

And just before my mind shut down, the Midnight King let me go.