She matched his smile. “Don’t get on my nerves, and we’ll see.” A pause, glancing around her for something, anything, to break the tension in the air. Her search stopped at her half-finished cornbread and salted sardines. “Please,” she said, sweeping a hand over the meal. “Join me for dinner.”
His lips quirked and he approached, footsteps sounding loudly in the silence. The bed creaked as he sat himself tentatively at the foot of it. The entire time, his eyes never left her face. “I suppose it’s true what they say about royalty. In the presence of a princess, a common dacha can feel like a palace and a peasant’s meal like a king’s feast.”
Ana lowered her gaze, staring at her meal without really seeing it. The shape of his outline in front of her seemed to take up the entire room, the entire world. With her blood Affinity gone and the powers in her siphon muted by the blackstone collar she wore, she realized this was the first time she’d taken in the sight of him as he was without the churning warmth beneath his skin. He’d bathed, his hair still wet and clinging to the ridges of his face, and he smelled of soap and salt and swordmetal all in one. It was a scent she remembered, that she’d tasted beneath a rain-soaked night an ocean away.
She was suddenly aware of her own disheveled hair, mud and blood and sweat clinging to her. Even so, as she summoned the courage to look into his face again, she found his eyes fixed on her as though he were drinking in the sight of her.
“Are you…all right?” he said. The hesitation in his voice wasnew; she couldn’t recall many times Ramson Quicktongue had run out of words.
She licked her lips and glanced down at the siphon on her wrist. The patterns on it continued to shift and swirl, black and gray and red blending into a sea of blue-green.
Three moons,of which two remained.
The dark rings beneath her eyes, the coughing fits, the blood on her hands and sleeves. The ache in her body as she ran, the bright flame of Yuri’s hair dimming as she fell behind; propelled by a fighter’s spirit that could no longer overcome the weakness in her legs.
“I…”I’m fine.But the words faded as she looked into those familiar hazel eyes, and realized that she might not have many more chances to tell him the truth.
That she owed it to him. Before any of this—whatever this was, whatever had happened between them that night in the storm—went any further.
Before it became too late.
Ana swallowed, and finished her sentence. “I’m dying, Ramson.”
His face shifted like waters beneath an ice-covered lake, emotions passing through his eyes, beneath the mask of his frozen smile. And then the façade began to crumble slowly, terrifyingly, like a mountain into dust, and it was then that Ana realized the time for playing pretend was over between them.
Ramson leaned forward and caught her hand in his. She shivered at the way his fingers felt on the bare skin of her gloveless hand. “There is a way, Ana.” His voice was rough. “Iknowthere is, because I—”
“Stop. Please.” Her head hurt, her heart was pounding too hard; fatigue, adrenaline, the ache of something so sweet and so sad that she could burst, all rushed to her, and she found herself squeezing her eyes shut. Hope. It was hope that she heard in his voice, and it was hope that cut deeper than anything else. Because after that day in the Blue Fort, after that kiss in the rain, she’d allowed herself to hope that there was some semblance of a future left for her and the man she’d grown to care for. That, possibly and impossibly, he’d come to care for her, too.
To have it all snatched away in the span of a breath was too cruel a punishment to bear. She couldn’t let herself think there was anything left for Anastacya Mikhailov, the girl who once was, who’d hoped for a family and a future and love.
She needed to be the Red Tigress, leader of the rebellion, the one to overthrow a mad monarch and give her people the life they deserved.
Pain bloomed deep in her chest, so painful that, for a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
Amid it all, there was the sound of water hissing as it turned to steam.
Ana drew a shaky breath and opened her eyes, focusing on the room before her. Above the curtain to the back of the room, the water Daya had heated for her was boiling over. Steam rose in coils overhead.
“I’d like to take a bath,” she heard herself saying, her voice hollow. “I—can we speak tomorrow? After we’ve rested?”
Ramson was still looking at her, his expression giving way to surprise and then something hinging on embarrassment. “Oh,” he said, and quickly withdrew his hand, running it through his hair. “I—sorry. Yes, of course.”
Ana slid from the bed. She winced as her body twanged in pain—and a new realization occurred to her. She saw it spread over Ramson’s face at the same time as he looked to her stomach, the raw flesh of her still-healing wound peeking out beneath her shirt.
A spot of color crept up his neck. “You…Do you…” He gestured helplessly at her midriff, and then her tunic and pants.
Her face heated. “I think I can manage,” she said. “Perhaps if you could help me put out the fire—”
Ramson looked both mortified and relieved at the same time. He nodded and stood quickly, almost tripping on his way over to the sequestered bath. He drew aside the curtain revealing a wooden stove and a tub.
Ramson extinguished the flames in the stove, dipped his hand in the bathwater. “It’s hot,” he said. “Gods be damned, if I’d knownthere was a stove…The water Daya gave me was practically ice.”
Ana laughed, relieved that they were jesting again. “It’s no secret that Daya likes me better,” she teased as she stepped through the brocade curtains, thick and patterned with stitchings of deer.
“Oh, she’ll succumb to my charm soon enough,” Ramson replied, and then he stepped back and cleared his throat. “I…Icould wait out here in case you…you need anything,” he managed.
“Oh.” She realized that, for the first time in their relationship, she had no Affinity to defend herself with. That in her current state, injured from battle and weak from what the siphon had done to her body, she was vulnerable.
