“Please.”
The word is broken, the usually soft syllables sharp like scattered pieces of glass. And when he lifts his gaze to mine, I feel the lethal edges of the pieces beneath my ribs. Something has happened since I saw Niko this morning; something that’s shredded him entirely.
“I’m the nightmare that’s doomed both our worlds, and tomorrow, I will endure whatever verbal lashing you deem fit to bestow.” His breath shudders, and his fingers twitch in his lap. “But I can’t now. Not tonight.”
“What happened?” I ask, my anger draining away even as I try to keep it in my hold. It’s easier to be angry with Niko than to feel the other things lurking beneath it. But as I take in the slump of his spine, the dejection and self-hatred pressing down onto his shoulders, the last of it slips from my grasp.
“More wreckage. More carrion,” he replies morosely, with a shake of his head. His eyes deaden as he nods to the bedroom. “I can stop playing if you need to sleep.”
I watch him for a long beat, and then my body is moving before my mind catches up. Niko’s eyes flare in disbelief as I choose notto leave him to drown in his angst, but instead, settle beside him on the piano bench. The bench is small, but not small enough that we touch, a few generous inches between our thighs. Even so, I feel him stiffen, the wary way he holds his body.
Glancing up at him from beneath my lashes, I feel suddenly shy as his scent of sandalwood and icy air encircles me. We’d slept in the same bed last night, but something about being in his space when exhaustion has torn every mask from him, feels far more intimate.
Ignoring the sudden pulse of my heat in my cheeks, I set the flowers atop the piano and motion to where his long fingers have gone still on the ivory keys. “Will you play me something?”
His brows rise fractionally.
“There’s no music in my world anymore,” I explain, feeling oddly breathless. “The plague—” I pause, not wanting to drown either of us in any more thoughts of the plague. At least not tonight. “—I mean…without imagination, music was one of the first things to die.”
Niko’s face is indeterminable as he studies me, and I get the impression he’s stopped breathing altogether. Maybe he doesn’t appreciate my closeness, or maybe, he’d prefer to wallow in whatever is troubling him alone. For a long moment, he doesn’t move, and I consider giving up and going to bed.
But despite all Niko’s faults, he hadn’t left me alone to my nightmares, even though he could have. It would have been easier for him to leave me locked in that room, to remain enigmatic and indifferent. But he’d stayed. Fought for me.
He made me feel safe.
So, I try one more time. “Please.”
An echo of his plea to me only moments earlier.
The word seems to jolt him from whatever trance he’s in. He straightens, planting his bare feet on the ground and readjusting his hands to the proper position. Then his fingers begin to moveover the keys once more, gliding and dancing in a mesmerizing grace. He reads no music, playing from his memory or his heart, I’m not sure. I only know that when he closes his eyes, so do I.
I let the melody flow through me like water, a wave of emotion rising up from the depths of my soul. It washes over me entirely, dousing me in the silky feel of memory, cradling me in a soft cloud of hope. Tears sting my eyes as Niko plays a song filled with deep notes of melancholy, peppered with quick, high inflections of something brighter. Teasing a wishful future, while acknowledging the dark of the past.
The last notes reverberate through the air, bouncing against the atrium glass, before dissipating into silence. The music leaves my body like a receding tide, even as I squeeze my eyes shut in an effort to keep hold of it. To imprint the feel of this moment onto the surface of my heart.
I brace myself for the empty feeling that always follows something pleasurable. Isn’t that how it is when I find something to fill me up? A temporary solution that only exacerbates the pervasive emptiness. But as I breathe slowly, the last chords still vibrating in my mind, for once, I’m still entirely full.
When I open my eyes, it’s to find Niko watching me with a reverent expression. A hot flush creeps over my cheeks, but when the king reaches toward me, his ungloved fingers stopping mere inches from my skin, all sense of embarrassment leaves me.
I want to lean into his touch, to feel his calloused fingers scrape over my jaw and throat. Hands of death, skin that promises no pleasure—only pain—and still, I want it. Ardently.Wretchedly.I’ve spent my life avoiding pain, terrified of having to relive the horrors of my youth; of losing myself in its depths, stripped down and debased of everything that makes me who I am.
Why, then, is Niko’s particular brand of pain so damned intriguing?
He slowly trails his finger through the air, and I swear I can feel the phantom pressure of his touch as he traces the roll of a tear over my cheek. I didn’t realize I’d let the tears fall; haven’t untangled the mess of emotions Niko’s melody unearthed from the depths of my soul. My lips part and my breath hitches in anticipation, my heartbeat walloping against my ribs.
Before I can damn all reason and throw myself at him, the king pulls his hand away, folding it into his lap with a rough swallow.
Disappointment threads through me. But he doesn’t drop his gaze, and in the fathomless obsidian, he allows me to see him. The raw sadness, the reverent worship. The agony and the hope. Everything that was in the song he gifted me, parts of himself laid bare at my feet.
“Thank you.” My voice is hardly more than a whisper, but he hears me well enough.
“I would give you everything beautiful you’ve been denied, Willa.”
It isn’t until much later, when I’m curled safely in Niko’s bed, his ribbons of death tangled beside my head, that it occurs to me he hadn’t spoken the words as a promise.
He’d said them as a wish.
“You’re not trying hard enough,” Niko snarls the next morning.
