Page 17

Thea

D awn arrived with the promise of a glorious day, but my heart felt too moonburned to be moved by the grand sweeps of pink and peach that made the sky outside look like a fragment from a painting. How strange it was to be going to bed at this meandering, in-between hour. No wonder Esperida always said that her life was like one endless night, days and months and years inseparable from each other.

The Castle was blissfully quiet. Everyone had already locked themselves away from the lethal light of the sun, and our two lonely shadows, Hector’s and mine, seemed to reach for each other in the stillness of the floor. “Why don’t you go ahead and rest?” he suggested.

Immediate disappointment swelled in my chest. “Where are you going?”

Perhaps it was a little presumptuous of me, but now that we were alone, I thought we were going to talk about what had happened earlier in the ballroom. Maybe even do more than just talk. I hoped for two bodies in one bed. I hoped for confessions and admissions and relief. I felt as though a barrier had crumbled between us, and whatever we chose to do with the pieces of this shattered wall now was going to alter the trajectory of our lives forever.

“I need to speak with Arawn,” was all Hector said.

He’s avoiding me , I realized, my heart eggshell thin. “Earlier… Did I misinterpret…”

“You didn’t.” The words left him in a rush. They didn’t allow much room for doubt. Still, he was not staying.

“I thought you might want to—”

“I did,” he interjected again. Then more firmly, “I do.” His gaze softened on mine, like the daylight outside softened the edges of the night. “Believe me, I want nothing more than to be alone with you right now. But Arawn…” He hesitated.

My own worries quieted as Arawn’s sunken eyes focused in the prism of my mind. “He’s heartbroken,” I murmured. “I don’t think I’ve seen him like this before. And he’s so thin, did you notice?”

A look of gut-wrenching guilt seized Hector’s face. “I don’t know how I missed it,” he whispered. “I should have been there for him.”

Had Hector not been in such a terrible shape himself, I knew he would have done much more than simply be there for Arawn. After all, Hector had been the one to hold me in his arms the first time a boy rejected me. Hector had been the one to rush across the Realm with or without the Castle every time I wrote to him that I’d fought with my parents or that I’d been feeling terribly lonely without him.

I pressed a little closer, slipping my fingers over the crescents of his arm. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You suffered a great loss. And when you’re hurting, it’s hard to see that the people around you are hurting as well. Sadness falls upon your eyes like a veil. It blinds you. It secludes you from the rest of the world.”

His throat bobbed, the shame in his face shifting into melancholy. “And how do you lift the veil?”

“You don’t,” I said, and the smile accompanying that sentiment was a sad one. “You wait for it to fall away little by little until you’re able to see the world in full color again.”

“But the people I’ve hurt—”

“They’ll forgive you,” I reassured him, squeezing his arm. “We’re not characters in a play. We’re not perfect, and we don’t have to be. We’re people. We’re messy and flawed and egotistical at times. And I will probably never understand why some people’s destinies are so much harder and heavier than others’, but I do know that if someone can’t forgive your sadness, then they don’t deserve your happiness.”

Hector looked at me closely for several silent moments, his backlit face as unreadable as ever. Then he leaned down and flicked my nose, his lips curving into a small, wistful smile. “When did you become so wise, hmm?”

Wise.

Would a wise woman follow the will of others as I’d done? Would a wise woman have so much trouble connecting with the parts of herself that were supposed to define her the most? Would a wise woman have been so blind to the man who’d been standing right in front of her all along?

“I’m an idiot,” I sighed resignedly.

Hector’s eyes grew hard on me, but not hard like stone, hard like glass. A hardness that was easy to break. “You give so much of your kindness to others,” he said. “I wish you left some for yourself.”

I didn’t know why these words hurt me so much, but suddenly everything inside me twisted. I wanted to disappear, recoil from him, and fade into the dark walls of the Castle.

“I’m going to bed,” I said with a dramatic yawn. “Let’s talk in the morning, yes?”

I turned on my heel, the hem of my dress swishing furiously against the marble floor. I didn’t have to check over my shoulder to know that Hector watched me shrink into the darkness.

How many times , I wondered, have we watched each other go?

◆◆◆

B urgundy draperies were drawn over every window, and with all the lamps and candles snuffed out for the day, the hallway was somber enough to kindle a spark of unease in my chest.

As the mass of gloom stretched out before me, I was overtaken with the same strange feeling that someone or some thing was watching me.

I both dreaded and ached to check over my shoulder to confirm I hadn’t gone completely mad, but my dilemma ceased when I felt the chill of a phantom touch along my arm.

Death. This feels like death , I thought, and with a scream lodged in the back of my throat, I whirled at once.

The corridor seemed to spiral away into the darkness: endless, bleak, and bereft of life apart from the frightened beats of my heart and the shuddering of my body.

No death creature loomed behind me, no passing ghost, only the sweeping sequence of black and white squares and the dark expansive walls. Yet the temperature took an eerie plunge, the bouquets on the pedestals withering, as if the magic of the Castle was failing one petal at a time.

My breath turned to fine mist before my eyes. Slowly, with a shiver crawling up my spine, I veered again—and screamed at the pale, red-eyed face that floated right above me. My fist came up on sheer instinct and beat against a stone-hard surface, which turned my panicked shriek into a howl of pain.

“What in the damned sky is wrong with you?” growled a frightfully unfamiliar voice.

I shook out my throbbing hand, blinking rapidly, only to realize that the floating, demon-eyed head before me belonged to Tieran, whose voice I’d never heard before.

“I’m so sorry,” I gasped, cupping my mouth in horror as I noticed the clean stream of blood trickling down his nose.

Tieran bared his fangs in a snarl, but his scarlet eyes were too flat, his marble face too passionless to convey real threat. Still, I felt myself recoil in suspicion, a sour taste of fear on my tongue. “Why—why are you following me?”

“I am trying to move past you. Our room is right next to yours,” he gritted out, pointing at the shiny black door behind me.

“Oh,” I mumbled, my alarm giving way to mortification.

Tieran wiped the blood that had settled over his upper lip with the back of his hand, the movement unsteady, almost spasmodic.

His skin, I realized, would have been rich and tan had he not looked so ill, and his almond-shaped eyes would have been warm and bright with intelligence had they been less listless.

How much had Camilla drunk from him? And why would Roan allow his husband to be treated like this?

Earlier in the study, I thought I saw love in Roan’s eyes and heard tenderness in his voice when he’d mentioned his husband. Camilla had to have some kind of hold over them. Something that prevented Roan from intervening and allowed her to do whatever she pleased.

I knew it was not my place to say something about it; in fact, I was certain I didn’t want to get caught in anything that involved Camilla, but I couldn’t abandon Tieran in this condition and go about my evening with a clean conscience either.

“Tieran, are you feeling okay? Can I get you something? Perhaps a cup of blood?” I asked, reaching up to brace his shaking shoulders.

Tieran shoved my hands away, his white fangs gleaming silver in the dim. “You can get lost.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t want your pity, and I don’t want your judgment,” he growled. “You think just because Hector doesn’t feed on you that you’re better than us?”

Shocked to the marrow of my bones, I brought a hand to the base of my throat, curling my fingers under the last string of pearls. “He—”

“Don’t bother lying,” he spat, stepping forward to slant his death-touched face directly over mine. “I don’t know if Hector chose you for political reasons, if he was afraid to evoke Dain’s wrath by marrying Dahlia, or if he simply didn’t want to deal with her romantic delusions for the rest of his life, but everybody here knows he doesn’t feed on you. You don’t have his scent, and you don’t have his bite, so don’t you dare judge me for something you can’t even comprehend.”

I wanted to be kind to him, for he seemed to be in great pain, and people in pain were often cruel without meaning to, but my anger overthrew my patience, and I pulled myself straight, forcing him to step back so our faces wouldn’t touch.

“Get out of my way, Tieran,” I said steadily, gathering my skirts in my fists. “I don’t care what you think about me, but I still am the Lady of the Castle.”

Tieran’s glowing eyes narrowed a fraction, his square jaw clenching as he stepped aside for me to pass.

My heart thundered as loudly as my heels clicked on the marble floor. I felt like I could no longer trust my eyes in the dark. I was in a new world, cold, bloodstained, and obscure, and it was erasing the one I’d known my entire life.

It was not a lawless world. But laws were chaos to the one who did not understand them.