It was the unspoken solution I’d settled on: If I filled my days with training sessions, missions to Midna, and more diplomatic meetings than I could count—all these grueling, mind-numbing, but necessary things—then I wouldn’t have time to think about what I was missing.
WhoIwas missing.
We were passing the hall where Aleksander’s bedroom had been.
For weeks, I’d looked the other way when I walked by his door. It had been a mistake, looking at it on the day after I’d lost him. A mistake I wouldn’t repeat now, regardless of how weak and foolish it made me feel to not even be able to look at a fuckingdoorwithout feeling as though a bottomless pit was ripping open inside of me.
Don’t look.
Eyes ahead.
Keep walking.
I kept walking, following Aveline in a sort of trance, somehow ending up undressed and sinking into a pool of steaming water some time later.
While I piled my long, dark waves into a messy bun on top of my head, Aveline sectioned off part of the baths with the aid of folding privacy screens. She left and returned several times, carrying various scrubs and soothing oils; an assortment of fresh fruit served on a silver platter; and then, finally, one of my favorite dresses—a fitted gown of scarlet with golden accents, which always made me feel like a queen forged in flames.
Everything I needed was now here. I wouldn’t have to return to my room before my meeting. I wouldn’t have to walk past Aleksander’s empty room again any time soon, and I wondered if Aveline had planned it that way on purpose.
Knowing her…yes.
She’d been looking out for me since the first moment I arrived in this palace, and that hadn’t changed.
Warmed by the thought, I sank lower into the steaming water, trying to let it soothe away the weight of the day.
Phantom eventually trotted into the space. He didn’t care for the hot water, but he was a fan of the warm stones edging the pools; he was curled up and asleep on them in no time at all. I watched his dark sides rising and falling in a steady rhythm, trying to match his calm breathing.
The heat was soothing at first, until it triggered a memory of warm light—of magic that had caressed and illuminated even the darkest parts of me.
My skin prickled.
My stomach tangled into knots.
He’s not here,I reminded myself fiercely.Your magic is the only thing you have. It has to be enough, for now.
The problem was, no matter how hard I worked to stand on my own two feet, my power was intrinsically intertwined with his. Along with my heart.
In the quiet, lonely warmth of these pools, I felt his magic like a living memory inside of me. I saw his face when I blinked…an image that would have been a welcome sight, if not for the soft, echoing voice that often accompanied it. Not his voice, but the voice of the one who had stolen his body—Lorien.
And yet, there were also moments when I thought I could feel Aleksander’s voice trying to break through. When I heard his words rising loudly, clearly over the beast that had come between us.
We are not a tragedy, he’d once told me.
I was clinging to those words with everything I had.
It was killing me, being unable to ignore all the other obligations I had to attend to—to not be able to drop everything and focus only on storming my way to wherever he was. On saving him.
But it had to be a calculated effort, I knew; we needed answers about what Lorien had truly done. What he was doing. What he wascapableof doing.
And I had the rest of Noctaris to worry about, besides.
So for now, I would simply stay busy with what I could.
I would focus on attending to my endless meetings and other royal obligations. I wouldn’t think of his closed door, or the empty room behind it, and I would ignore that infinite pit in my stomach that felt as if it might swallow me up if I dared to keep still for too long. Because this once-doomed world was now on the cusp of unfolding, poised to break or to bloom.
And it needed me more than I needed time to grieve.
FOUR
