He doesn’t shy away from my accusation. “You’re right,” he admits. “Forgive me for being guilty of the same cowardice I’ve accused you of.”
Before I can begin to sort through the rise of emotions his apology beckons to the surface, he steps further into my space, his lean frame towering over mine.
“Willa.” He says my name like a breath in the midnight air. “There was a reason your father sold you to those camps. It wasn’t just in exchange for your sister, was it?”
His words clang through me like alarm bells, and fear spikes over my skin. Familiar, like the honed edge of a blade. The innate sense torun.To wriggle free from the bindings Niko’s attempting to wrap around me.
I push myself to sitting, planting my toes on the floor. I gaze up at him, trying to determine how much he knows, but his stony expression gives nothing away.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I reply neutrally, tossing the thick curtain of my hair over my shoulder, and keeping my face carefully blank.
Something like rage flashes in his eyes, and my body tenses as I imagine all the ways the king could extract the truth. The touch of his ribbons had been glacial and silent—how would it feel if it wasn’t just a brush of death, but to be inundated in it?
But Niko doesn’t move to hurt me. He only lowers himself to kneel at my feet. He isn’t wearing a shirt, dressed in the same gray sweats he’d worn when he saved me from my nightmares.The intricate sprawl of tattoos is stark against his snow-white skin, but my gaze skirts over the delicious carve of his abdomen to where his fingers rest on the bench on either side of me.
He’s left them bare.
I snap my eyes to his in question.
With slow intention, he wraps both of his hands around my thighs and gently pulls them apart, fitting his body more snugly between them. Kneeling as he would at an altar.
“You were right to call me a coward,” he admits in a soft voice. “I have beenterrifiedto touch you.” His thumbs begin to circle softly over my inner thigh. “But not for the reasons you think.”
I nearly shudder in pleasure as the calloused pads of his thumbs scrape softly against my sensitive skin. But I keep myself stiff, warily watching Niko bowed before me. He’s beautiful at my feet—dark eyes and pale skin. Severely angled cheekbones and soft, lush lips. A study in contrasts.
“I haven’t touched anyone since I killed the Aeternalis.”
The words rend straight through my heart.
Pan died two hundred years ago. Could it be possible Niko hasn’t touchedanyonein over two centuries? The thought opens an unexpected hollow of grief at the center of me, for how horrible to be starved of another’s warmth for so long? Even in the depths of my isolation, I’ve always been able to seek out the company of others, even if it was temporary.
Niko’s fingers move wider, sliding up the expanse of my thigh toward where I’m already soaking wet. Where I’ve been aching since he abandoned me in this same room, hours before.
My head swims at his touch, ice and heat warring over my skin with each gentle swipe of his thumbs. His long fingers press into the outside of my thighs with a possession that makes me want to lower the steel wall around me; to pull him into me and let him drown in my touch.
And when he peeks up at me through his thick lashes, it becomes harder to remember why I haven’t already done it.
“Do you know why, Willa?” he asks in a low voice.
Dread winds through me along with my renewed desire, the emotions fighting so furiously in my stomach, I fear they’ll vibrate right through my skin. I want to flee; to run so far from Niko he’ll never be able to find the depths he searches for. I want him to never stop touching me, to baptize me in his death and pain; to hold me down and dig into the soul of me; to steal my secrets so that I no longer have to carry the heavy burden of them alone.
Indecision keeps me frozen in place, and for a moment, I wish time would freeze along with me. That it would stretch and warp, keeping me in this stasis where the world is warm and the Carrion King looks at me likethat.
Niko draws his eyes away from my thighs, glancing around the room. Then he laughs.
A gasp escapes me as I follow his gaze to find the atrium, the windows, the sparkling stone trees, have all blurred together in a riot of shadows. Like him and I are speeding through time, and everything else has frozen in place.
“It seems you’ve found the place your magic has been hiding, Darling,” he purrs, resuming his strokes of my skin. Higher still, his calloused fingers rolling lightly over my hip bones.
If this is the place of my power, it isn’t a place of whimsy. It’s a hole of desperation, fed both by my fear of Niko and my want of him.
When his gaze returns to mine, it’s lethal. “But that isn’t the only power you’ve been keeping from me, is it?”
When I don’t answer, that smile he’d worn the first night we met graces his face. The elegant, cruel amusement of a man who always gets what he wants. “Two hundred and seven years, eight months and thirteen days. That’s how long it has been since I’vefelt the warmth of another, because it isn’t only my ribbons that are lethal.”
If I hadn’t already accidentally frozen us in time, his words would have certainly done it. Ice cold awareness drips down the back of my neck, as Niko reaches behind me to pluck one of the blooms I brought home from Adira’s.
He cradles it in his palm, and my breath hitches as the flower wilts before my eyes. In a blink, black necrosis spreads over the bright orange petals, devouring the bloom’s vitality until it’s a twisted, dead thing in Niko’s hand. The same as he’d done the night I fell into Letum. I thought it was the touch of his ribbons, but now, I understand my mistake all too well.
