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It was early the following morning, just as she imagined, when a knocking sounded at her door. Dressed in a simple beige dress, her arms decadent in sheer gossamer, the neckline shaped like a heart, and spiraling with wispy embroidery, she called for the individual to enter.

Her heart raced when Evrardin made himself present in her doorway. Biting the inside of her cheek, she turned to him. “Here to finally take me to my cell?” she dryly asked.

Evrardin gave her an unamused expression. His eyes trailed behind her, noting the slight stain on her floor, but the scene of last night otherwise vacant. She barely slept last night.

Mara huffed in response. “Well, this will be fun.” The first light of the early morning melted over the hardwood floor, and she languidly appraised him. Then she narrowed her eyes. “You look like shit,” she said before she could think otherwise.

“You know how much I live for your compliments. Careful, liten rev , I might start to think you like me.”

Mara repressed her scoff, but she didn’t manage to hold back her smile. “I only meant?—”

“Yes, I know what you meant. And I know I look like all hells.”

They turned to walk down the hall, Mara’s steps a few traces behind Evrardin’s faster pace. “Did you not sleep?”

Evrardin let out a groan. “No, it appears I didn’t. Always so observant, Princess,” he mocked, but Mara ignored his cadence. She wondered if it had to do with the assassin from the night prior. If had been up all night for the same reason she had.

A few beats passed before Evrardin cleared his throat. “Did you sleep all right?”

She tentatively gazed sidelong at him. She debated lying, but she didn’t see the point in that. “Not particularly.” She bit her lips. “I thought you might come back.” Her cheeks went hot, her eyes refusing to look over at him, hating to admit she had hoped he would have come back to her after he took away the body. To be with her. To protect her. Evrardin’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword out of her peripheral vision.

He shook his head. “I stood guard outside your door.”

She stumbled in her steps. “You…” She blinked several times, making sense of his words. “All night?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

He remained silent and she let that consume her. Mara pulled on her sleeve, the sharp end to their conversation overwhelming. She stopped in her tracks abruptly. “Oh! Wait,” she called.

Evrardin turned to look back at her, spinning on his feet and raising a brow in question.

“I forgot to give you back your cloak. I, uh, washed it for you.” Her cheeks blazed with heat. “You know, so it’s not covered in my horrendous smell,” she tried to joke, but her words were strained. She pushed her hair out of her face and rolled anxiously on the balls of her feet. “I forgot to thank you for that. For, you know…”

Ambivalence welled in Evrardin’s eyes as he studied her anxious state, making Mara’s cheeks shine a bright crimson.

“Ah, forgot you took that since you only wanted to berate me the other day.” His eyes averted her own. “One of your maidens can return it.”

She spoke through clenched teeth, hating how pathetic she sounded. “Perfect.”

Evrardin had stood in place for what felt like hours, watching over Mara as she tore through the library, trying to find anything to work with. She found things on her family’s house, but very little about glassfairing. It was mentioned only by name in a tome about the gods, but it didn’t give her anything of use.

She grew frustrated, a headache beginning to brew in the front of her skull. The library was stuffy, the summer sun boiling in through the stained windows. She stood, exasperated, and went looking for another book. She could feel Ev’s eyes on her every time she moved, it was driving her mad.

“Do you watch the prince as attentively as this?” Silence. “He was the one with the assassin on his tail, not me.”

“He’s not as fun to watch.”

She gritted her teeth. “Oh, watching me read in the library is fun now? You might need to get out more.”

His lip ticked slightly in the corner. “Watching you fluster under my watch is fun.”

Her face went warm, and he mirthlessly chuckled at how easy she was to embarrass. “It’s not hard to guess why you have no friends.”

“Do you take me as someone who longs for friendships, liten rev ?”

She circled a desk, her eyes on the books sprawled upon the tabletop. “The company of a crazy old alchemist hidden away in the dungeons is enough for you, then?”

His jaw clenched at the mention of Crowrot. She hadn’t meant it as a jab, she liked Crowrot. A lot. She just couldn’t stop the way she lusted to crawl under the captain’s skin.

“I get all the company I need. Trust me.”

Her heart raced. She moved in silence, his eyes still on her.

When she sat back down, she pulled her hair up, tying it with a spare ribbon she carried in her dress pocket, trying to cool down in the oppressive library.

“What is that?”

Mara jumped, Evrardin’s harsh voice crashing through the still room like thunder. “What is what?” She hesitated before flickering her eyes over to him as he approached.

“On the back of your neck.”

Instinctively, Mara reached her hand and placed it on top of where Cas had gripped her at the masquerade. She had forgotten how irritated her skin felt after Acastus had pressed his fingers a bit too harshly against her, almost like he had claws poking through his gloves. Everytime he touched her, he seemed to leave marks in possession.

In a panic, she quickly let her hair back down, ready to suffer from a sweaty neck in the hopes Evrardin would leave it alone.

“I don’t know.”

Her eyes widened in shock as he stood before her and shoved her hair aside, his knuckles grazing her skin in the process.

Frozen in place, she looked up at him, his gaze startling her.

“Did you walk in on something you shouldn’t have?”

Mara scrunched her face. “What the hell are you talking about, Evrardin?” Her chest began to beat erratically.

He grunted before taking a step back, letting her hair cascade down her back in rushing rivulets of chestnut. “You’re not making this easy.”

“Making what easy?”

He went silent again, she knew he wasn’t going to entertain this conversation any further.

“Is he… Is something wrong with the prince?” she asked boldly, but her voice quiet. When she got the courage to look back at Evrardin, he was giving her a quizzical look. “An affliction of some sort?”

She scrunched her nose when he didn’t say anything. It was impossible to talk him into a proper conversation. It frustrated her to no end.

“Heed my words for once, and do not go snooping around. If I find marks on your neck one more time?—”

“You’ll what?” she challenged.

“I’ll have to force you to listen.” There was something harsh laced in his words—they ran up her spine and sent a trail of gooseflesh in their wake. Her usual quip slipped out of her grasp.

Mara turned back to her tomes and flipped through the texts. When she realized Evrardin wasn’t moving back to his previous placehold, she decided to press him more, honestly quite tired from shifting through materials in hopes of finding any semblance of glassfairing in the texts. If he wasn’t going to answer her first question, and she refused to tell him what happened to her neck, she’d shift the conversation.

“What do you do when you leave the castle at night?”

He lifted a brow. “What do you mean?”

She cleared her throat, nervously scanning the book in front of her to keep her eyes busy while not digesting any of the words. “That night I saw you coming back from the inlet. You were covered in blood and grime.”

Evrardin looked like he was thinking back to that moment. “That's really none of your business, liten rev .”

Mara groaned at the man towering above her. “Stop calling me that!”

The smallest hint of a smirk corrupted Ev’s face, her eyes drawn to the scar dissecting his lips. “Why? Does it bother you?”

She scowled at him before shoving her chair back and gathering the books in her arms to put back on the shelves. “Just tell me what it means.” She went down the rows before finding the spots where she took the brown forgotten books and placed them gently back into their slot.

Evrardin followed behind her absentmindedly. “It’s nothing obscene.”

Wonderful. And she had to just take his word for that? She doubted it meant anything far beyond bitch or insufferable-spoiled-brat.

Putting the last book on the shelf, she spun to face him. She gasped at his proximity. “I don’t believe you,” she said through clenched teeth.

His deep brown eyes held hers in competition. His usual stony face appeared incensed. She swore she could feel the exuberance radiating from him in a buzz. She imagined he wanted nothing more than to pick her up and toss her out the highest window in the castle. And she was starting to think she’d let him.

After far too many beats of silence, their eyes never pulling apart, his voice cut through the tense air. “It means little vixen .”

Surprised and for some odd reason, believing him, Mara struggled to find her words. Her hands grabbed at her dress, anxiously squeezing it in between her fingers. “Why do you call me that?” she asked breathlessly.

“Because you’re feisty and elusive… and I can’t seem to figure you out.”

She inched closer to him, her eyes narrowing in on his. “I’m rather simple, Evrardin,”—he took in a breath, and she swallowed before continuing— “you say it all the time yourself. I’m just a spoiled princess who doesn’t know how to think for herself. Can’t get much easier to decipher than that.”

His eyes danced between hers and then much to her surprise, they flickered momentarily down to her lips. “I’m starting to think I might have been wrong.”

She swallowed. “Well, sorry to disappoint. You know how much it upsets me,” she said mockingly, though she was strangely out of breath.

Evrardin took a small step, closing the space between them so her chest stood a mere inch from his own. “There you go, putting words in my mouth again.” Mara swallowed, tracing his lips with her eyes as he spoke down at her. “I never said that disappointed me.”

Mara’s lips parted in nerves. “No?” she asked.

“No.”

She found it hard to keep his stare, a fit of blazing heat covering her head to toe.

His fingers lit her on fire as they landed beneath her chin, tilting her face back up toward his forbearing one.

His name escaped her lips in a breathless whisper; both of their faces being pulled together by an unseen force. She could almost feel his lips grazing hers as he slouched over to better reach her. She was suddenly filled with the urge to run her fingers through his messy hair, to feel his overgrown stubble on her face as he kissed her, to be squished in his arms wrapped tightly around her as he pushed her against the bookshelf behind them.

His hooked fingers pulled her face dangerously close to his own. And what was worse than that: she let him. Out of vulgar desperation nestled between them in this dark corner of the library.

Before their lips could meet, Mara whispered, “I don’t think…”

Evrardin’s eyes slid up from the pink swell of her lips and kept her shocked gaze for a moment, his rugged face disjointedly gentle and full of indistinct emotions.

And then, without warning, he pulled away, the heat from his body replaced by the air of the room that she thought too warm only minutes earlier but now left her freezing. His hands were back by his side, the one that was on her chin now gripping the hilt of his sword through strained fingers.

He looked at her for a moment longer before turning and walking back toward the entryway of the library. “Let me know when you’re ready to leave.”

Mara’s hand flew to her chest, heaving in big gulps of air to try and steady herself.

She didn’t want to go back to the desk she had her books sprawled upon just to fall flat under Evrardin’s presence. Instead, she got comfortable on the floor in one of the many winding rows of shelves and flipped through the tomes.

Mara sighed as she propped open another large book on her lap, scanning the table of contents for anything that might be of use.

What if she simply refused to do what the prince requested? The bruise on her neck tingled as if it had ears of its own and was reminding her of how little she truly knew about him. Would she want to risk upsetting him? He wouldn’t actually hurt her, would he? Evrardin’s immediate recognition of the bruise being Cas’ doing said otherwise.

Her finger glided along the table of contents until she stopped on the words Khonsu: Mirror Demons .

She quickly flipped to that page, hoping she finally found something. Anything. She was getting desperate.

She skipped the first few paragraphs, scanning for things of note, then came to a halt.

The God of Travel had been irate with the people of the south, more importantly, the Glass King, King Glaer. Khonsu and the Glass People had left this world, taking the asinine trip to the Veil, along with several other gods: Trana the Goddess of the Sun, Molr the God of Night, Vetr the God of Winter, Dyr the Goddess of all Creatures, and Nie Goddess of the Moon.

Unlikely to make an appearance while the Glass King still reigned, reporting sightings of Glass People in their reflections began to make rounds. The king had ordered all mirrors destroyed or covered in fear of what Khonsu might do from the Veil where his powers could be properly channeled.

It wasn’t until the king stumbled into a long-forgotten hall of the castle that a floor-length mirror stood at the ready. Whether it had been forgotten about and not destroyed with the others, or left unveiled on purpose, isn’t known. The king faced himself in the reflection, too late to escape. Nothing happened right away, and the king laughed, thinking himself silly for being so worried. The god of travel might be able to wisp away to far reaches, but to travel through mirrors? Laughable.

The king stared at himself until he noticed his eyes going dark and his head moving as he stood still. Decaying lanky hands reached out and grabbed him, taking him through the mirror and into the Veil where everything went dark.

The king returned in pure horror, screaming down the halls. Having to be kept away in his rooms, he never recovered, muttering nonsense about reflections being but a trick of the eye. A demon waited on the other side of the mirror, waiting for its victim, mimicking them until it tore them across realms.

The king appeared too horror-stricken to recite what had occurred to him beyond our Veil, screaming in terror whenever Master Skrá tried to elicit details of his travels. The Glass King never returned to how he once was.

Khonsu is still said to be waiting just beyond our Veil for victims, stealing all he can from the Glass Court, desolate of powers. As long as mirrors are obscured, the ability of Khonsu or any of the Glass People to glassfaire lay improbable.

She carefully closed the history tome, putting it aside on the floor, not bothering to find its home on the shelf, and made her way to the library’s entrance, her mind falling solemn.

Evrardin followed her hesitantly back to her rooms where she entered before closing the door, not speaking another word to him.