As the prince turns to leave, a slow smile unfurls on my lips. I’m too much of a bastard to let this chance pass.
“Ahhh,” I moan theatrically. “The bliss of knowing something your enemy does not.”
The prince pauses, right hand opening and closing into a fist. In his left hand dangles the keys to these cells.
“Don’t toy with me, Colden.” He swings around, a half-snarl on his lips. “I know your tells. The way you taunt to detract from the truth.”
I walk to the cell door, slip my arms through the bars, and rest my elbows on the crosspiece. “Or maybe you don’t know me at all. Like you said, it was only one night. Only a few meaningless, breathless kisses.”
His face hardens. “You were in my home for days. Don’t think I didn’t watch you even more closely when wine wasn’t clouding my better judgment. And after these last minutes, I doubt anything has changed about you.”
I make sure there’s a mocking tilt to my smile as I give him my surest stare. “I thought you said you’d forgotten our time together. Me and my unimpressive mouth.”
Words I know are lies. On Winter Road, he’d repeated a part of our conversation from that warm summer night together. Words that only held meaning for him and me. Thirty years ago, I made a jest about living forever without any sort of power, and once he sensed that my power had been torn from me, he’d thrown my words in my face. What’s the point in living forever if you’re boring?
He stares at me, his expression one of held-back rage. He wants to throttle me, which is perfect, because I want him to come a little closer so I can snatch those godsdamn keys.
As though my words command him, he stalks forward. Close, but not close enough.
“Stop baiting me,” he demands, “and speak your mind. Or I will carve that tongue you think so highly of from your throat with one of these.” He flashes the keys.
The image of his threat jars me, I’ll give him that.
But I hold all the cards.
“Well, you see, here’s the thing. A long time ago, possibly before you were even an urge in your mystery father’s blue balls, Alexus did a stupid thing. He bound himself to me with Summerlander magick that has held for three hundred years. His immortality depends on mine. If you kill me or let any fatal harm come my way, you lose him too.”
I can’t resist an enormous grin.
The prince’s eye twitches. His chest rises and falls faster as he processes my words. “You’re bluffing.”
“Oh, but I am not. Why do you think we’ve stayed together all this time? It isn’t because Alexus can’t resist me, because I assure you, he can and has. Now he’s like a brother to me, one who cared enough to help keep me alive. To give me a reason to live another day.” I tilt my head. “Again, do you never ponder these things? How did you imagine he’d survived the last three hundred years?”
His brain is working. I can see it.
“You want me to believe that Alexi of Ghent gave you his… eternity?”
I’ve never heard it described like that, but now that the words have left the prince’s mouth, I’m not sure I’ll ever stop hearing them.
“Yes, because he did. It ate at my conscience for years, but what was I to do? At one point, I wanted to die. An unending existence as a Frost King, even with Alexus at my side, seemed a horrendous fate. But how could I end his life too? It seemed he wanted to live, that he was searching for something I couldn’t understand. Besides, after enough time, one adjusts, and living forever begins to feel like it was meant to be.” I pause at the honesty I’m revealing and search for my cavalier veneer. I find it quickly and wear it like a second skin. “You wouldn’t know anything about such a plight, seeing how you must eat souls to live.” I tsk to annoy him, and a disgusting revelation strikes. Was he already devouring souls when I met him? I think of the woman in the cell. “That’s what happened to her, isn’t it?” I jerk my head toward my rotting roommate. “You devoured her essence, then had second thoughts. Is she going to reanimate? Wake up a flesh-eating monster? Is that why she has a collar? Where’s the leash? I should know since I’m being forced to sleep next to her.”
Wearing a sadistic grin, the prince tucks the keys in his pocket and heads for the stairs. His shadows follow like the rising tide of the Eastland Territories’ Black Sea. When he reaches the third step, the last one within view, he pauses and looks my way.
In a voice laced with wicked delight, he says, “I suppose you must wait and see what she is. Just as I must wait and see if you’re the liar I believe you are.”
He disappears up the stairwell, and I return to my place on the cold, hard ground, thinking about the prince’s plan for Alexus. As thoughts race through my mind, I focus on the matted tuft of dark red hair flowing from one desolate patch of scalp at the back of the dead woman’s head. The sight puts me on edge, and I find my thoughts shifting, waiting for her to crawl from that bed in her skeletal remains.
Nonsense. Pure nonsense.
I tuck my wadded jacket beneath my head and lie down. I don’t know if it’s night or day, only that I’m fucking tired.
“Sweet dreams, princess,” I mumble before closing my eyes. “Try not to let the maggots bite.”
It isn’t until minutes later when I’ve started to drift that I swear a draft of power winds through the subterranean dungeon, carrying a whisper-voice into my cell on the end of a raspy, wet breath.
My eyes dart open, but there’s nothing to see save for the flickering torches and the unmoving body, still hidden beneath that blanket.
I must be going mad down here because what I felt and heard is impossible.
