“Good night.” I push the door to my room open and close it quickly behind me, not giving myself a chance to linger on his declaration. Hiding my weapons in the armoire, I toss the towels in my hamper before turning the shower to the hottest it will go. I try to wash the night off of me as best as I can, but a hint of something still lingers when I step out. Like the ominous feeling I had after killing Sir Dae, I can’t quite name what remains, only that it leaves me uneasy.
Looking into the bathroom mirror, I’m pleased to see that no bruise marks my face from my scuffle earlier in the evening, only a small red mark that is tender to the touch but at least easily hidden beneath makeup. Dressing in a long-sleeved nightgown, I brush my teeth and hair and then crawl into bed, exhausted down to my very marrow and yet unable to find the relief of sleep.
My brother’s voice tortures me as I toss and turn. I know Navin cares about me far more than warranted. He is good, deserving of more than the life our father has laid out for him. Though I know he would never say it, I wonder if in moments like earlier tonight, he regrets teaching me how to fight. If he wishes he would have stood by as I destroyed myself instead of intervening.
But he hadn’t. He saved me from myself, saved me when no one elsewantedto, and for that, I will never be able to repay him. Whether I deserve it or not, I have a life debt owed to him too. Bonding a dragon and freeing him from the duties of being the crown prince is the least I can fucking do, and no matter what comes tomorrow with Father Yamin or the king, no matter how I wish I could kill Aria instead of train her, I will not yield and I will not fail. Because Navin is wrong, I can’t simply ignore how much I care about him. I am just better at making him think that I don’t.
Chapter Thirty-Three: Rhea
Coolairblowninfrom the ocean stirs the thin fabric of my chemise, the golden light of sunrise dashing across a vibrant pink and purple sky. Sitting on the window ledge, I clutch the black leather journal tightly in my hands, its spine resting against the tops of my thighs. The journal’s contents—Alexi’s words and thoughts, his hopes and dreams and sadness and anger—are precious, each paragraph worth more than all the gold a treasury could hold. I knew Alexi, all the important parts of him anyway. I could decipher a look on his face or filter outthe words he wasn’t saying between the ones he was. He was my guard, and he was my father. He only visited me for an hour at a time, yet I felt like I had gained a lifetime of knowledge from him.
But between the pages of this journal, written in short, precise capital letters, were things I had never heard Alexi express before. His impression of our first meeting, and his thoughts that led up to it. His frustration with the king and how he kept me locked up. His prose was the most beautiful when he mentioned his wife, both before and after her death. Alexi had been so brief when he talked about Alanna, as if he could only handle the memory of her in small pieces before her loss became too overwhelming. I suppose, to a degree, I understood that. I could relate to the feeling of an empty spot at my side that someone had once filled so thoroughly.
I had tried to pace myself when Xander gave me the journal, knowing that this tether to a man long since gone would be short lived. But as I began reading, the words morphed from simple writing on a page to his voice inside my head. I could nearlyfeelhim sitting next to me, a look on his face that somehow balanced stern amusement.
His writing was inconsistent. Sometimes there were daily updates, though the entries were much shorter and written like a list of events. Then months would go by, the only clue that time had passed in the content of the entry itself, as Alexi never wrote out the dates. A few entries had years between them, the most notable taking place after his wife’s death. His writing after those time gaps was always the most elegant—the most thoughtful. Like he had kept everything he wanted to say locked within until no more would fit, and it all came tumbling it out. Those were my favorite ones to read becausethatwas a side to Alexi he so rarely let me see. I know it was because he was shielding me,only wanting to present the version of himself that he thought I needed. He was selfless in that way.
But reading through his heartbreak—his turmoil at coming to the decision to no longer be my guard and then the ravaging guilt afterwards—made me realize just how much I wished I could have gotten to know Alexi outside of our confines as guard and princess. I loved him, but I so often felt alone in the way I thought and felt. What I longed for. To learn that he experienced those same emotions… It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. It makes me all the more grateful to have had a man in my life who never shied away from sharing himself with me. Who always reassured me that everything I was—with all my broken pieces—was everything he wanted.Every version of you is one that I want,Nox had told me. He had also shown me, in so many unspoken ways, just how deeply he meant what he said.
Another breeze slips in through the crack of the open window, making the pages of the journal flutter. I only have a handful left, having read in my spare time between the king’s demands of me and my lessons with Eve and Lady Mia.
Xander and I hadn’t talked about what he revealed the day he gave me the journal, and I hadn’t given him an answer about letting him help me get free of the king. It isn’t that I don’t want help, and it isn’t even that I necessarily distrust him. It’s the image that is burned into my mind—him holding Alexi by the hair as the king spears his sword through my guard’s chest. It is him—cold and calculating—the morning after as he tells me to move so he can take Alexi’s body. It is him—his eyes, specifically—as they meet mine during a beating from the king, no emotion at all etched into their dark depths. Xander has been a fixed presence in my subconscious as someone who aided the king in hurting me. I don’t know if I can reconcile who he appears to benowwith the version of him in my head.
Over the course of the week, when I wasn’t taking dancing lessons or being forced to learn table etiquette, I had tense meals with my uncle. He toyed with his control over me, commands ranging from drinking wine until my eyes blurred and my mind went numb, to forcing me to endure his touch by sitting in his lap as his hands caressed my sides. I preferred the effects of the alcohol, even if I woke the next day paying for it. At least then, I couldn’t remember what he said or did.
Sometimes, Simon was there, his sneer ever-present. My skin crawled with disquiet whenever his gaze lingered on me, as if he wasn’t looking at me butthroughme.
The nightmare of his tools slicing through my skin haunts me nearly every night, and sometimes I wake coated with sweat and confused. My nerves acting as if those nightmares are real, even as my body bears zero evidence of them.
Proof of the brand, however, is very much existent. My hip still aches with the raw tenderness of it, the swollen and puckered skin one I avoid looking at as much as possible.
Every day after my mandatory lessons, I retreat to the library. I no longer read for the pleasure of escapism, instead scouring the shelves for any possible clue on how to free my magic. The problem is not only do I not know where to evenbegin, but the books at my disposal are mostly fiction. It makes Xander’s offer all the more tempting.
Simon has given the king no new updates from the Mage Kingdom in my presence. Nothing new on Nox and his family. As the end of another week comes into view—marking this as my third week since waking up here—dread begins to creep inside my chest. Whispers of the same question repeat in my mind:Why hasn’t he come for me? Even though I know, rationally, that he has no idea where I am. That he could still be stuck in that deep sleep Simon had claimed he was in. That there couldbe a myriad of things keeping Nox exactly where he is. But those rational thoughts do nothing to coax away my apprehension.
It is a different kind of torture to knowexactlywhat I’m missing out on. To not just hope and wish for something better, as I did for so long in that tower, but to have actually tasted that freedom only to then be stripped of it, leaving something bitter in its wake.
Between the externalandinternal conflicts that savagely demand my attention, Alexi’s journal has become a sweet spot of reprieve. I don’t want it to end, and so, as I sit on the window ledge as the sun finishes rising in the sky, I go back and revisit some of my favorite entries, saving those last few pages for the day I might be able to read beside another.
Eve is hurt. She tried to hide it when she entered my room this morning with breakfast and word that the king had a meeting with the siren queen through the Mirror, meaning that I was to eat alone. She favored her right leg as she walked, her back hunched just a small bit forward as if she couldn’t draw herself up fully. For the first time since I met her, she wore her hair down. It hung low to just below her mid back, but when she had absentmindedly tossed the strands over her shoulder as she prepped my outfit for the day, it revealed a collection of bruises along the side of her neck. She must have felt me looking because she stiffened for a moment before immediately bringing her hair forward to cover them.
I decided then to keep my question on how she might have acquired them to myself.
Eve’s personality is bright and often reminds me of Elora. It is easy to find myself sucked into her orbit during our otherwise banal tea lessons. Even as I worry about the oath that scarsher hand. Perhaps it will be my own loneliness that creates my downfall, but I find that with every one-on-one that we have, another part of me softens towards her. Especially at the excitement in her voice when she speaks about how proud she is of her younger sister. At the sadness that sometimes tinges it when she talks of the premature death of her parents. And then there is the yearning I sense when I ask about her next visit after taking a sip of tea. She gave a half answer: She isn’t sure when, but she hopes it will be soon. But it was the way she said it, speaking like one would talk about an impossibly large stack of books one hopes to read. There was an air of longing to it—like it wasn’t quite a tangible reality—that made my stomach sour. Is she stuck here because of me? AmIthe reason that she can’t see her family?
“Are you not hungry?” Eve asks, crossing my room from where she’s organized my dresses in the closet to where I stare out the window at the roiling sea. My appetite since arriving here has fluctuated between casual hunger to outright revolt at the thought of food. A pity, considering the meals I had been served at the very leastlookedlike they would taste incredible.
“Not really.”
Eve nods and crosses her arms over her chest. “Which kingdom do you think it belongs to?” she asks, nodding out to a ship that is bobbing over the choppy waters.
My mouth quirks as I stare at it, the vessel much too far away to make out any sort of kingdom insignia. “Mortal Kingdom would be boring,” I tease, my grin growing when she laughs.
“Shifter, then?”
“Could be. Back home, there was a lot of talk about the Shifter Kingdom.” I don’t know why, exactly, I say that, and the silence that descends is proof of Eve’s own shock that I’ve spoken about any part of my life before. In my pursuit of making sure I don’t say anything that might be used against me, I oftenonly speak about surface level things. My dance lessons or the latest book I read. This is a deviation—a shift in conversation driven by the fact that Imissmy friends. I miss having people to talk with that I can trust. I miss mylife.
“Isthe Mage Kingdom your home?” she asks, so quietly at first that I wonder if she meant to voice it all. But I hear the unspoken question, the same one Xander gave me with his eyes when we spoke of his secret movement.You are heir to this kingdom’s throne; is this place not your home as well?
