1
Lorant
“She. Is. Not here! Why isn’t she here?” I ground my teeth, the silence, the lack of progress, shredding my nerves.
“She’s coming. I know it. This is going to work.” There was Merrick in his true form. He clung to hope during the day, while I was the viper. The assassin. Hope’s flames don’t flicker in the night.
“How do you hold on to the feeling that this will turn out right?” I asked, truly wanting to know.
He paused. “I have to.”
Because I couldn’t.
If only I’d… It was too late for recriminations. “We’re either fucked or we’re… Actually, I believe we’re well and truly fucked.”
Because of me. I was cruel to her. Itwasmy nature.My share of the curse. But I’d flayed her with my pain. Hurt her because I was being tortured myself.
I didn’t know how to fix it. Like always, that fell to Merrick.
“We’renotfucked,” he whispered. “This is going to work.”
“She hates me,” I said with a glum sigh. “Not you.” Never him.
“I don’t believe she does. She’s the one. It’s finally happening.”
If only I could grab on to his hope, his unfailing belief that Reyla could do what no one else had.
But then, it wasn’t in me to feel optimism. Or kindness. Even love, I supposed.
Except for my wildfire.
“Where is she?” I glared at the door.
“You’re too impatient.”
“We don’t have long.” Despair was another feeling I’d wallowed in until I met her. To get this close only to fail would hurt all the more because it would mean I’d ruined things for us both. “Thereisn’tenough time.”
“It’ll have to be, right?” As if we’d switched personalities for the first time, bleakness came through in his voice. The fact that Merrick had picked up on the feelings churning through me showed me how close we were to losing everything. “When she gets here, be nice. Apologize and tell her…whatever it is you can come up with that’ll make her smile at you again.”
If she’d speak with me. “I’ll try.”
“Thank you. If only you’d seen her at the coronation.” His excitement bloomed once more. “The dinner. Even our first dance. She was amazing.” The pride in his voice made jealousy lash through me. I wanted all her smiles. All her touches. Everything that was his that might never be mine. “She was so happy when Justifar placed the crown on her head, making her my queen.”
“Ourqueen,” I snapped.
“Same thing.”
It was, yet it wasn’t. Not yet. Maybe never. I ached to be everything instead of essentially nothing.
“She’s close, and frankly, that humbles me,” he said. “I don’t deserve her.”
He did more than me.
The faintest ripple whispered along the edge of my senses, a distortion I wouldn’t have noticed if my fury wasn’t already blade-sharp. I paused, listening.
No sound. No creak of footsteps. No shift in the wind.
Just silence. Unnerving silence.
