Page 23 of The Nightmare Bride

C onsciousness seeped in, layer by layer.

Soft, gray light.

A steady heartbeat. Pattering rain.

Then pain. Lots of it. Deep and old, laced along the framework of my skeleton.

I groaned and forced my lashes apart, expecting an eyeful of ceiling. Instead, I got a rain-studded windowpane, an expanse of red sheets, and a bare, solid chest beneath my cheek.

I was...lying on my side. Unchained. Wearing only a chemise. With a half-clothed prince serving as my body pillow.

I raised my head, my cheek unpeeling from its resting place, then abandoned the effort when the room began a sick whirl.

“Ugh.” My face thwacked back down. An arm tightened around me, and I craned my neck to find crystalline eyes trained on me.

“Good morning,” Kyven said.

My belly rippled. I probably would’ve thrown up all over him if I’d had anything in my stomach to eject. “Is it?”

“I can’t say I have any objections to waking up this way, so yes. It is. At least from where I’m standing.”

“But you’re lying down.” My voice sounded like a rusty tap being forced. “And you could at least pretend not to be so fucking cheerful.”

His chest hitched with suppressed laughter, which had the inconvenient side-effect of ramming an icepick through my skull.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

Thankfully, Kyven took the hint and stilled.

His fingers curled around my upper arm, firm and hot.

Our thighs wove together, and his heart thudded against my ear—serene, steady, slower than mine had ever been.

Probably a function of all that wood-chopping and sheep-shearing.

In the background, the rain dripped a soft chorus.

Once my head stopped stabbing itself, the overall effect was...nice. And since moving had proved agonizing, I didn’t try again.

Instead, I probed my mind for an accounting of last night.

I remembered screams flaying my throat. The dwindling throes of the storm.

Kyven—Ky?—unlocking my chains and unfastening my dress, then shedding his clothes and pulling me against him.

Murmured reassurances. It’s over, lioness. It’s finished. You’re safe .

And before all that, Oceansgate. Theatre and ale and dancing. A hazy whirl of panic that had ended with the man I’d married saving two lives. Not just mine, but?—

I jerked upright, my head shearing itself in half. “Amryssa!”

Kyven pulled me back down. “Is downstairs at the moment, eating her breakfast.”

“What?” My throat cracked around the word.

“Mmm-hmm. I gave your keychain to Miss Quist. Told her you could use a morning’s reprieve.

She was surprisingly amenable to getting the Lady dressed and fed.

Said Miss Amryssa needs to eat more, anyway, and she’d get an entire breakfast in her if it was the last thing she did.

If you ask me, that woman is in dire need of someone to force-feed. ”

I processed that. “You mean you got up already? Then came back to bed?”

His hand found my hair and smoothed the strands through his fingers. “I didn’t want you waking up alone. You spend all your time looking after the Lady Amryssa, but as far as I can tell, no one ever looks after you.”

A hollow ache opened within me. He might as well have sunk a knife between my ribs and twisted. I heaved myself half upright, propping my forearms on his chest.

Kyven gazed down his cheeks at me, a hint of smile contouring his lips.

And something very strange happened.

It started beneath my ribs—the flutter of a thousand delicate wings taking flight. Warmth lightened my limbs, then sighed outward, sparkling its way down to my fingers and toes.

He looked...different. Maybe it was the aftereffects of the storm, but his beauty moved me on some seismic level I couldn’t explain. The lines of his face came together like a symphony, harmonic and familiar, yet somehow startlingly new.

My gaze flickered away, but then I found myself staring at the half-moon birthmark beneath his collarbone. My fingers quivered with the need to find out whether it felt as smooth as it looked.

Which I resisted. Barely.

“You...” I murmured to his chest, “...saved me.”

Spare words, but backed by a whole wide wall of wonder. Kyven could have done anything last night—hurt me, abandoned me, consigned me to the storm. I’d been as vulnerable as a tortoise stranded belly-up, but he’d protected me. Again. Me and Amryssa, both.

Goddess. If our positions had been reversed, I would’ve left him.

“Before you make me out to be some kind of savior,” he said, “it cost me nothing to do what I did. I’m only sorry I didn’t manage to guide you through it better.”

My fingers edged toward his birthmark. Had it cost him nothing? He’d stolen a horse for my sake. Helped break Amryssa’s fall, then brought her to safety. And through it all, I’d tasted his urgency as sharply as my own.

No, that couldn’t have come for free.

At the realization, conviction hardened within me.

Eliana’s letter was wrong. It had to be.

I didn’t know how, or why, only that this man wasn’t the monster she’d described. I would’ve staked my life on it. I had, really, last night. And he’d acquitted himself.

Which didn’t answer even one of my questions. If anything, it only created more. Who was this man? What secrets was he keeping, if not those?

“Who are...” I started. “How did you... When the nightmare...”

Goddess. I couldn’t think properly with him stroking my hair like that.

He made a humming sound. “We both have rather a lot to explain, don’t we?”

I lifted my eyes. “Me? Why me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps you’d like to tell me how a woman falling from a third-story window can come fluttering to earth as softly as a feather?”

I swallowed. Okay. Fair point.

But I couldn’t explain that to myself, much less him. I’d never managed anything like it before. In the past, the dagger had only ever worked subtly, and at close range.

Then again, I’d never channeled magic with last night’s desperation, or come so close to losing Amryssa. Still, something more had been at work. The nightmare had joined me for a second. As if our agendas had aligned.

“I’ve seen magic before,” Kyven said. “In Hyperion’s temple, in Hightower City.

People offer prayer candles, and the wicks ignite on their own to show he’s listening.

But what you did last night... I’ve never seen magic wrought by human hands.

I don’t believe it can be wrought by human hands.

Which makes you...what? Some type of goddess?

I don’t suppose you’re Zephyrine herself, hiding in plain sight? ”

I blinked at the absurdity of that.

“Because if so,” he mused, “I suppose I’m the one who married up, here.”

A chuckle warmed my throat. Now he was only teasing. “No, I’m just a person. And I can’t explain last night. All I can tell you is that the magic comes from the dagger.”

One eyebrow skewed upward. “The dagger?”

“Yes. The one Olivian gave me. There’s something inside it, an...enchantment, I think. But last night—well, I don’t know what happened. The magic’s never been that strong. I’ve definitely never seen it, and I’ve never drawn power from the storm. I didn’t even know I could.”

Gears turned visibly in his head. “Maybe Zephyrine’s inside that knife of yours, somehow?”

I gathered a protest, then stopped. Huh. Why had I never considered Zephyrine?

Maybe because she’d vanished years ago. Or maybe because, in Oceansgate, the bayou seemed to harbor a magic of its own.

While Hightower boasted a central, official temple, Oceansgate revered its thousand-year-old oak, and, by extension, the marsh itself.

Here, people believed in nature’s witchery, in a whole second world that lurked beneath the mirrored waters.

They feared witches and wights, boogeymen and ghosts.

Not to mention hexes and evil eyes and apparently abandoned little girls who couldn’t brush their own hair.

Belief in the supernatural permeated Oceansgate’s collective consciousness, and I’d bought into that myself, ascribing the dagger’s power to some kind of witchcraft.

But someone from Hightower would analyze this the sensible way—by setting aside superstition. And if magic indeed came from the gods, then Zephyrine might not be sleeping, but...stuck. Inside the blade Olivian had given me.

The idea rocked me. Seven hells. Had Amryssa’s mother snared the goddess inside her knife, somehow? If so, did Olivian know? And why did the dagger’s inhabitant feel so...incomplete?

“I can’t think of any other explanation,” Kyven said.

“No, me neither,” I said slowly. “Aside from witchcraft, which, you’re right, probably doesn’t exist.”

“Probably not.”

Facts wheeled through my head. The Lady Marche had died in the third nightmare, after getting caught out in the marsh.

Back then, the storms had been weaker, enough that I’d survived the first two unchained, but by the third, everyone had known what to do.

Which meant the Lady should never have ventured into the swamp without a way to protect herself.

What had she been doing out there?

I thought. And thought. Until my headache swelled to an impossible size and my mind ran so many circles it started chewing on its own tail.

Kyven seemed to sense my struggle. “It’s nothing we have to solve this morning.”

“No, I guess not.” With reluctance, I shelved my deliberations for later, when I had a clear head.

Kyven studied me. His hand drifted from my hair to my face, cupping my cheek in a rough palm. The touch wasn’t any different from last night’s, but this time, a prickle shot across my skin.

I cleared my throat. Focus . I wasn’t the only one who’d done something inexplicable.

“The nightmare,” I said, trying to piece together a sensible question. “You’d...done that before, hadn’t you? Resisted like that? You must have. You must’ve done it your first night here.”

A half smile. “Yes.”

“But...you’re from Hightower. How could you possibly have known how?”