“Would you ever forgivehimfor stealing your wings, Rina? Would you forgive him tearing you out of the freedom of the sky, and trapping you in the muddy hells of the earth?”
Marina doesn’t answer, but I don’t need her to. I know the phantom pain of something stolen all too well; how it feels to lose the part of yourself that runs wild.
“I will be the one who trapped Willa, who stole her freedom and ruined her future. She won’t be able to leave the island but make no mistake…she will leaveme.”
My ribbons skate over my skin, and pain lashes through me so viciously that, for a moment, I lose focus of the room. “Willa is a dangerously wounded creature. She won’t just leave me for thebetrayal. She’ll kill me for it if she can,” I grit out, as Marina’s face drifts back into view.
Marina’s eyes flare.You don’t know that. That she’d be capable of itorthat she would even want to.
Her hands hesitate midair, and a deep sadness flickers over her face.There’s something in Willa that’s drawn to you. I’ve seen the way she is with your death. After so many years of pain, you deserve something good, Niko, even if it’s fleeting—
I turn away before I can absorb the rest of her words; before the truth of them sink beneath my skin and bury themselves in my dead heart like flickers of light. My hope for myself has been dead for a century, and I don’t want it reawakened—I’m stronger with the rot seeping from the decayed organ to my bloodstream. If everything in me is stained black, a few more terrible acts will hardly matter.
Marina reaches a hand toward me, her palm curling in the air over my shoulder without touching it. She means it as a comfort, but it feels like a mockery.
I heave a breath, steadying myself enough to meet her gaze once more; to face the tears shining in her eyes. “Worry not, dear Rina. Willa’s self-preservation and feral nature is exactly what I admire about her. Star knows, I’d be far more disappointed if she left me alive.”
Chapter twenty-six
By the time the carriage drops me at the steps of the Lunaedon, fury vibrates through me so vehemently, I’m certain if I glance down, I’ll see it spilling from my chest onto the shining floors in a burning wave. I’ve been angry for so long, I’ve grown numb to the heat, butthisanger—the way it prickles through my veins—is different. Jagged. Intimate.
Niko’s half-lies are an iron dagger through my belly—a septic wound whose poison bleeds into everything else—and they shouldn’t be. I’d known he had his own machinations; known that he only shared the truths convenient to him. But I foolishly allowed a few kind gestures and pity of his pain to cloud my judgement.
Am I really so starved in the shadows for human connection, so pathetic, that I latched onto the first person to shine a light?
I charge into the entrance hall and up the thousands of stairs to Niko’s chambers, the bouquet of flowers gripped far too tightly in my fist. I plant my feet, prepared to hack my waythrough his blasted door, but to my surprise, it disappears at my touch.
The sitting room is empty and dark, spare one lantern burning low on the far wall. The door reforms behind me, and I stall in place as a soft melody trails through the stillness. My indignation sputters like the flame in the lanterns, as I stride past the paintings and the neat desk, to a nondescript door set to the right of the overstuffed bookshelves.
This one, too, disappears at my touch, revealing a small but gorgeous glass atrium. The circular room hangs over the cliffside, and with the way the inlaid glass panels curve overhead, stepping into the room feels like stepping into the sky. Black, stone trees mimic the curve of the glass, sheltering the room in weeping vines and sparkling onyx leaves. And at the center, Niko sits at a worn grand piano.
His dark eyes, scrubbed clean of his usual makeup, only briefly meet mine, his gaze barely landing before it flickers back to where his bare fingers dance over the ivory keys. The melody is both mournful and beautiful, weaving through the air and settling deep in my chest; the place where unshed tears wait in dark pools, and abandonment twists like thorned vines.
For a moment, frozen in the threshold, my anger is entirely forgotten. I listen to the music—to the sadness and lonely desperation I thought was only my own, made tangible. Shaped in isolation and molded into the universal. A way to not only understand a soul, but to tie it to yours by shared heartache.
Niko is beautiful as he plays. His eyes are closed, his body curved over the keys. His ribbons dance in the air around his head, undulating to the rhythm with a darkly hypnotic sensuality. Thick, raven curls tumble over his forehead as he sways in time with the music, and in the gentle starlight pouring in through the windows, the sharp angles of his jaw and cheekbones appear almost ethereal.
The harmony winds through the atrium, tethering us together in an intimate stasis. He plays, and I listen, and we bothfeel.
The song ends, and Niko drops his hands to his side, his expression sheathed in shadows as he stares down at the keys for a few long moments. When his black gaze finally lifts to mine, potent heat shoots straight through the center of me, scorching my chest, lighting up the spaces between my ribs. I don’t know whether it’s my anger returned, or something far more dangerous: desire.
I pick the most manageable of the two emotions, throwing my hands on my hips and glaring at him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a Strayed? That you were the one who killed the Aeternalis and damned everyone?” My throat grows tight. “Why didn’t you tell meyoucaused the plague?”
The King of Carrion is always ready to spar with me—to meet me blow for blow, never ceding an inch. But tonight, Niko only swallows, the bob of his tattooed throat slow and measured as I charge forward. Sudden desperation threads alongside my fury—a longing to get him beneath me and peel back his skin until I know every piece of him. Every secret he hides, every dark desire.
It isn’t just my need to understand Letum or to learn my magic. Just as there is power in freedom, it also lies in knowledge, in shining light on the mysterious shadows and revealing their true nature. Iwantthat power over Niko.
If I’m truly honest, it’s that same want that’s taken my rage and honed it into something so profound. It isn’t that he’s the villain the stories say he is, or even that he’s the cause of the plague. It’s that I’ve already begun to grant him the power of knowingme. I’ve given him small pieces of myself I’ve never allowed anyone else to touch. And I thought he’d done the same.
But he hadn’t—not really. He’d only given me morsels, and because I was starving, I mistook them as enough.
“You’re the reason my sister is dead. The reason I was tortured for years! Is that why you want me to find my magic? To fix your own horrible mistakes?”
I’m ready for the king to fight back. To stand up and meet my fury with his own, that wicked mouth always ready with a cutting response. But instead, Niko stays still, staring up at me with a fractured expression. Like the agony and sorrow trapped in his soul have become too much, shattering through his smooth façade. And he doesn’t have the energy to gather any of it back up.
“Leave it be, Willa,” he murmurs.
I scoff derisively. “If you expect me to let it go, you don’t know me as well as you claim to,Your Majesty.”
