I placed my hand over his. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He leaned down and kissed me. Soft and slow, his lips warm against mine, tasting like morning and something darker. When he pulled back, he searched my face with an intensity that made my breath catch.
“Your eyes,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to them.”
“What about them?”
“They’re violet. The color of twilight. The color of the void between sunset and full dark.” His thumb traced beneath my eye, gentle. “Beautiful. Unnatural. Mine.”
Lowen made a disgruntled sound and leaped off my chest. He padded to the foot of the bed, circled twice, and settled into a ball of fur with his tail wrapped around his nose.
Within seconds he was purring again, content in the way only cats could be.
I sat up. The silk sheets pooled around my waist, cool against my skin. I was naked still, had collapsed into bed after the confrontation with Mabyn and slept through the rest of the day and all through the night.
My body ached in places, a pleasant soreness that spoke of transformation and magic and the ritual in the crypts.
“I want to see,” I said.
Cador raised an eyebrow. “See what?”
“Myself. What I look like now.” I glanced toward the far wall, where the tall mirror stood. The one I’d cracked three weeks ago when I’d first arrived. “That mirror. Is it still broken?”
“The servants replaced the glass two days ago, while we were in the crypts. It’s whole now.”
I slid out of bed. My bare feet touched the cold stone floor, and the chill was comfort. Home.
I crossed the room naked, aware of Cador’s gaze following me, aware of the way his eyes traced the line of my spine, the curve of my hips.
The mirror loomed against the far wall. It was the same one I’d cracked on my arrival, its massive frame of carved black wood reaching nearly to the ceiling. But the glass was new, flawless and waiting.
I stopped in front of it.
The woman staring back at me was a stranger.
Pale skin, paler than before, if that was possible. The color of fresh snow. But not gray. Not corpse-like. Just pale in the way the moon was pale, in the way starlight was pale. Luminous rather than dead.
My hair fell past my shoulders in waves the color of wheat and honey, shining with a light that hadn’t been there before.
And my eyes were violet, deep and rich, the color bleeding from iris into the whites until my entire eye glowed with that twilight hue. Not human eyes. Not monster eyes either, something in between. Something woven from the empty spaces.
I reached out slowly. Touched the mirror’s surface with one fingertip.
The glass was cold. Smooth. Whole.
My reflection remained intact.
No spiderwebbing cracks. No fractures spreading from the point of contact. Just me, looking back at myself, whole and clear and true.
I pressed my palm flat against the glass. The reflection matched my movement perfectly. Showed me exactly what I was. Death-blessed, Realm-touched, ruler of ice and feathers.
Not wrong. Not broken. Just different.
“It doesn’t crack anymore.” I studied my reflection. “I don’t look human.”
“You’re not.” His footsteps crossed the room. I felt him behind me before I saw him, felt his heat at my back, felt the bond humming between us.
“Not anymore.”
