His eyes narrowed, asking a silent question before he turned back to my neck, letting his lips move feather-soft up toward my ear. Shivers wracked my body, and my nipples scraped against my cotton shirt. Then another droplet rolled down my leg, and onto the wooden floor. Thorn pulled back and glanced down, his gaze cataloguing every detail. How humiliating.
“I have to go,” I repeated. “To the bathroom.”
“No, you don’t, Roya,” he said, his voice a rasp. “This is normal.” He moved his body to block the door. “I can’t let you leave the cabin. Kavin is out there, and while I think all the sailors are Betas...”
What did that have to do with anything? I crossed the tiny room to sit on Kavin’s bed. The sheets were still crumpled from the night before. Thorn had always said I was the messiest assassin he’d ever trained, and I didn’t deny it, though I was meticulous when it came to poisons.
But for some reason, the sheets being disorganized made me anxious. I let my fingers move over the cloth, feeling the folds that appeared under my hands, arranging them in some undefinable shape.
I reached back for the thin pillow and pulled the case away, using it to soften the corner by the wall, and the pillow to make an incline closer to the… “What in the world am I doing?”
I looked up at Thorn and froze. For a split second, before he had time to smooth out the expression there, his face had been wreathed with desperate need, and pride, and…grief? Like he was seeing something he wanted more than anything in the world but couldn’t have.
But hecouldhave me. Why didn’t he know that?
“Come here,” I said, surprised when my normally high-pitched voice came out husky and rich.
“I can’t, little queen,” he said, and calmly stepped toward the door.
“Why not?” Why was my voice so odd, growly at one moment, and whiny the next? “I’m here, inviting you to come to me. I want you, Thorn. I… I love you. I’ve always loved you, even when I really was too young for you. I’m not now. You kept me safe and made me strong. You made me whole, Thorn. Why won’t you be with me?”
Why couldn’t I have what other women had? Something so small, and simple as this: the arms of a man I loved around me, the feeling of his lips on mine, the knowledge that he loved me in return.
“Because…” He hesitated, his eyes shining with regret. “You have the start of a lovely nest there, my sweet girl. If I join you, I will claim you. And then we will both die together.”
My heart stuttered. “What do you mean?”
He turned, and his voice was muffled as he answered. “Nothing has changed, Roya. I can’t touch you.”
Words he didn’t say shimmered in the air between us.I can’t love you.
The door closed behind him with a soft snick that sounded and felt like a blade cutting through the center of my heart.
I never cried in front of others. It was a lesson I’d learned in the palace at Verdan City. Crying gave the person who witnessed the tears a weapon to use against you, the knowledge of how to break you down. Make you weak. The officers had loved tormenting the Omegas in the harem enough to make them cry.
Supposedly, before the ancient Omegas had all died in the plagues, Alphas had been our natural protectors. The ones I had known had been delighted to break us down, reveal our weaknesses.
I never wanted anyone to know how weak I really was inside. And the seam at which I was the most vulnerable, the thinnest place in my soul, was where Thorn had just stabbed me. My deepest fear was that I would never be loved by a man who truly valued me—the only man who had ever embraced me for who I was, not what I looked like.
I might not have been broken before, as Valerie insisted. But I was now. I had been rejected by the man I had loved my whole life.
No one was there to see me, and I kept my sobs silent. I would dry my tears, and then never let any man close enough to break me again.
* * *
We had clear skies,strong winds, and enough good luck that no one was surprised when it took a turn for the worse. A storm brewing on the horizon moved in just before nightfall, forcing us into our cabins.
After two weeks of Thorn avoiding me like I was plague-ridden but spending hours every day with Kavin on deck, I expected him to ignore me, and he did. Kavin told me stories about his country, though, until I fell asleep.
Sometime in the night I woke, the ship pitching so hard I thought we must be capsizing. I had been dreaming of a faceless Alpha with golden wings, and the sheets beneath me were slick with my own sweat and smelled of sour oranges.
The bed I was on pitched high and I grabbed hold of the wooden rail on the side.
“Roya?” Thorn’s voice came from the hammock. “Do you need to move to the floor?”
I hadn’t even opened my mouth to answer when I heard Kavin’s voice from the far side of the room. “No, she’ll roll into the chest. The bed has sides.”
The bed might have sides, or at least a thin wooden slat that surrounded the mattress, but I was about to pitch over them. “Is there a strap? To hold me down?”
