“Then hallucinations.”
My eyes flared and my pulse quickened. Hallucinations?
“Youshouldbe okay.”
Should be?
“Elowyn, listen. You must not think of anything you do not wish to say. You have control over this. Over your thoughts. But youwillshare anything that comes to mind.” His words washed over me like the tide on a beach. “Avoid what you are not ready to say.”
The room spun around at a dizzying speed, blood whooshing in my ears with thoughts that threatened to tell all. There is a journal under the pillow in my chambers. His mother’s journal. In it is the secret of how to escape Naiadon. Which I plan to do. Escape. With Arlo. With his men. My lips moved with the thoughts against my will under Hylos’s blue hand, the only thing keeping my secrets concealed.
“The captain,” Nixie said at my side, her voice clamoring like a thousand church bells. But with the captain only came thoughts of escape, of plotting. How we worked together each day in the library.
My lips ran with betraying words.
“I’ve seen how you look at him, you think he’s handsome. Think of that,” Nixie declared. My thoughts wound around Arlo, the sweet warmth in his eyes. Of his body. And instead of shoving them down, like I often did, I allowed them to unfold.
Nixie was right, that was a truth I could tell. How his sea-sharpened body made mine feel hot and alive. How his perfect, slender fingers would play the virginal so well, and I longed for them inside me, curling just right with his beautiful mouth doing the rest of the job. How I knewit when they first touched me. Even if it was to force me in that damned room, the bastard. The domineering, glorious bastard.
“Will that work? Do you have him in your mind?” Hylos asked.
When he spoke, his eyes morphed into something else. Someone else. Truth. He was the truth.
I nodded yes.
“Good. Nixie, take her to her room immediately. This will only get worse. Stay by her side. I’ll send Lumina to help, maybe she knows of a cure.”
Hylos finally removed his hand, and the words were like a deluge: “Captain Arlo Fynn is so bloody handsome, it is absurd. Even if he is an overbearing asshole. He is exquisite.Resplendent.”
“Come on, let’s get you out of here,” Nixie said as she ushered me through the sea of words spinning around me, the world tilted on a bizarre axis.
“And when that handsome, annoying man looks at me, for the first time in all of my life, I feel seen. I believe he sees me. For once someone sees me.”
Chapter 27
In my bedchamber, the hallucinations gripped me. Nixie and Lumina were near, but felt lifespans away, only visible as rose and gold smears that bled into one another.
The truth still dribbled out of me in broken sentences.
“I need to get out of here,” I choked out, my body thrashing but heavy from the world’s distortion.
Or did someone hold me to the bed? Did someone chain me to this bed?
“Set me free!” I yelled, and the words shimmered before me in the room. “I need to find Arlo. We need to leave.”
“Who could have done this to her?” Words like blush peonies, shuddering in a meadow, fluttered across the room like butterflies.
“You know who did this.” Candlelight flickering in a dark room said, “Calypstra.” The name caught flame and burned to black ashes before my eyes.
Then, at the base of the bed, my mother appeared.
Stark and clear as day. Sound and color and time cascading around her, like she was a stone in a roaring river.
“You are a princess, Elowyn.” Her voice rippled, finding me in this strange place that felt like it was between life and death itself. “You are aqueen!” Her voice boomed as she watched me writhing under the weight of the words.
“No,” I yelled. “I am nothing. No one.”
“Queensdo not cry.” But a torrent poured from her dark-blue eyes, like the angry sea, gushing and gushing, dark-blue waves washing over me. Lapping over me. Drowning me.
