Click. Click. Click.
What the hell was that?
It took another full minute until the realization hit me hard in the chest, straightening my spine and dumping more adrenaline through my system until my hands shook and my stomach churned.
Claws. Claws in the dark. Like the claws on the feet of a very arrogant, relentless predator.
He was in the hall, probably not far away from the door to the library. A giddy kind of euphoric buzz started at the base of my skull and spread to fully snuff out my common sense. I dropped into a crouch with a grin, and skirted along the bookshelf to the next aisle and darted deeper into the library, passing towering book shelves that stretched far enough above me to obscure their tops in the darkness. Must be one hell of a vaulted ceiling. I usedthe light of my Link to navigate, hoping that the shelves hid me enough from view that he wouldn’t see it, and came to another grand staircase, and shot up to the second level of the library. There were seating areas with covered couches and chairs, and I passed by a truly spectacular fireplace that looked plucked straight out of a fairytale and up another wide set of stairs to the third floor.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Rathal crooned. There was a heated edge to his tone that had my brain scrambling, and a dim far away voice was screaming warnings inside my skull I couldn’t be bothered to understand right now.
“You’re giving me mixed signals, Callie. One minute you are telling me stop, and then the next you are challenging me. What is it that you want, darling?” Rathal asked, his voice echoing softly from somewhere below.
Wasn’t that the sixty-four thousand dollar question? I didn’t know. All I knew was that in this particular moment in time, I wanted him to catch me. What I wanted him to do once he caught me was a little fuzzy, but it wasn’t leaving me alone in my room, that was for sure.
“You’re confused. I understand. It must be difficult to have things change so drastically in such a short time. You have been whittled away bit by bit haven’t you? But, if you’d let me, I could help build you back up into something truly magnificent. Just think of all we could do together, my prize. I could be your ever eager servant. All you have to do is say yes,” he coaxed, his voice liquid and seductive, temptation dripping from every syllable.
He’d said my scent was easy to follow. Let's see how he navigates some overlap. I began to move up and down the aisles, crossing over my paths over and over again, until I’d circled most of the third floor twice. The third floor was an elongated oval, not too big, but not small either, with a balcony on the inside that was open to the first floor. There were display casesfilled with animal skeletons—one of which looked disturbingly human—tucked in between the aisles and I crawled under one, closing the heavy drapery in a way I hoped didn’t look disturbed and willed my Link light away. I could hear him coming up the stairs, his steps heavy and deliberate, like he was giving me time to hide.
“Let me love you, Callie. Marriage to me would not be a burden, I can promise you that. Set aside your human rules and misgivings, and give in to me.”
He talked a pretty game, I’d give him that. All that promise was starting to drip drop past my defenses. What would it be like to just give up? Would I be relieved or guilty?
“I can hear you thinking, Callie. It’s truly not that complicated. You say yes. We get married. And live happily ever after, the end.” He paused. “Well, after the war, of course. And then we have to discuss the matter of children, if we want them or not, and where to live, here or elsewhere. See? There is a lot to go over, so give in and then we can negotiate the particulars.”
Negotiate? I just bet. Let’s just say, hypothetically, I did marry him. I imagined every single thing going forward would be a debate. Every major decision he would counter and re-counter just to see me squirm. Or—I thought back to how he made a trade, a kiss for the forwarding of information—I would be trading a lot of ‘favors’ for what I wanted.
Though,a dark, nagging little voice said from my hindbrain,that kiss was spectacular. It wouldn’t be much of a burden to barter with those types of favors with Rathal, now would it?
I swear to god I hadn’t had any alcohol today. I wished I had. Being drunk was the only explanation for my attitude right now. Or maybe this was the other side of the slippery slope I was on in regards to my trauma. I’d already had my little freakout and beat up Breena and Rathal…and the Pit fight and the brawl at theAssembly… maybe the loosened inhibitions was a part of that… or maybe I just wasn’t as strong willed as I thought I was.
The sound of Rathal’s careful steps drew closer to me, but his voice had dropped too low for me to hear what he was saying. I tilted my head much like I had seen him do, but he stopped talking entirely and his footsteps drew to a stutter stop not three feet from my hiding spot. I waited to see if he would jerk the curtains apart and bark at me like a parent playing hide and seek with their kid who had dove under a bed, but he didn’t. Instead, he whispered something to himself, something too quiet for me to pick up completely but I swear it had sounded like he’d said ‘Mother’ as if he was greeting her.
Unable to stand it any longer, I peeked through the curtain and looked around in the gloom until I spotted him. He was standing under a gray beam of light, dust motes floating around him with his chin tucked down until it almost rested on his chest. His arms hung loosely at his sides and his usually lively tail was still and low to the floor. My chest tightened when I looked at his face. Those dark eyes that always seemed to be laughing at me were flat… lost.
Rathal was far, far away.
I crawled on hands and knees out from under the display case and got to my feet before slowly approaching him.
“Rathal?” I called softly, reaching out my fingers to brush them along his arm. His head snapped up, causing me to startle and jerk my hand away from him. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking right through me, like I wasn’t even there.
“Rathal?” I called again, and this time he blinked once, his eyes lighting up but still seeing something I couldn’t, and he smiled so softly, so gently, at whoever it was that he was seeing that my throat grew tight as I watched.
He stepped forward—and would have bumped into me had I not stepped to the side—and held out his hands to his ghost.
“What are you doing up this late? Has the Empress been plying you with too much Raska again? You know it gives you the jitters.”
He laughed at whatever it was that the ghost said, and moved in such a way that I knew he’d tucked someone in close to his side. If she was real, her hand would have been in the crook of his elbow judging by the way he held his arm close to his body. He was looking down at her with such a soft, loving look and I followed along behind them, desperate to hear the other side of this conversation.
“Have you and Father decided you wish to add to perfection then? You know how I long for a sister.”
He huffed dramatically and shook his head slowly in mock disappointment, tsking at her the way he did to me. “You fill me with sorrow, Mother, truly you do. Must I make do with the Rijiteran ruffians? Hella and the Sinister Sisters are hardly good company. They’ll have me turned to a life of crime and violence in no time flat, you mark my words.”
I smiled when he patted at her invisible hand on his arm and chuckled huskily.
“I’m very grateful for your confidence in my ability to resist their influence, but I must warn you that Radena—you do know her, she’s the youngest of Hella’s sisters, the reddish one. Yes, yes, the shiftiest of the lot, you are correct. Anyways, as I was saying, Radena is especially convincing. She has a way of making it seem like whatever plot she cooked up was your idea all along. Father caught us last time in the bakery with half a dozen cookies stuffed up our sleeves. I still don’t know how she got me from point A to point B. I was manipulated by a five year old. The shame will live with me for all eternity.”
I swear I could almost hear the soft female laughter that he was responding to. My own smile almost broke into giggles at the mental image of an adult Rathal’s shocked face as his fatherbusted him stealing cookies with a child only a few years out of toddlerhood.
