“Clever.” Half of the ghost’s mouth lifted into a smile.
Selene caught her breath at his expression. It was like being sliced by moonlight on the darkest night, that smile.
“How is this possible?” Selene lifted her hand and the stars danced. Magic was not for everyone. It required talent and study, a willingness to lose everything for the sake of a song. It couldn’t be this easy.
“Everything is different here.” His voice was a rumble of thunder dipped in honey. It was a timpani roll, an articulation of the cello.
“Where are we?” She tracked the shadowy edges of the light. They looked sketched, smudgy graphite marks that fed into a greater darkness.
“My prison.” The ghost brushed the dark hair from his eyes, face still cupped in shadow. “My tomb.”
Panic crawled up Selene’s spine.
“Is there a way out?”
His eyes unfocused. “I didn’t know there was a way in.”
What had he done to deserve a place like this? There was blood on his sleeves, that knife’s edge of a smile.
“Who are you?” Selene whispered.
Silence. Selene counted breaths until the quiet stretched so long that her skin rippled and crawled. She’d made a terrible mistake stepping into nowhere, this nothing. She ran arpeggios through her head, trying to calm her frantic heart, then took a step back. Looking for the way out.
There was nothing but shadow and shadow and shadow and him.
“I am a thing best forgotten.”
Selene swallowed the sharp side of a scream.
He turned his head, catching all the light and shadows. His cheekbones were high and sharp like the cut crystal of the chandelier. His jaw was strong and straight. There was a scar nicked into his eyebrow. That full mouth quirked up as to smile with a secret.
How could someone so beautiful be bad? There was some intangible quality to him that drew her in like the soft part of a song. She could see a light in his eyes, marred by a well of sorrow. It wasn’t like looking into the dead eyes on the tapestry of Renard or Prince Henri. The prince’s mere presence had made her skin crawl. She didn’t feel like that with this lovely, haunted stranger. There was something so familiar about him. Against all odds, something safe.
“A name, then,” she said.
He regarded her through his thick, dark lashes. “You are used to getting what you want.”
Selene’s stomach tightened. She was no worthless dilettante, with her space in the opera house bought and paid for, like Priya. “I’m used to working until what I want is mine.”
“Relentless.” He raised and lowered his wide, strong shoulders. “And perhaps foolish.”
There was a shape and sound to his words that was foreign to her. He spoke like most people sang. Each consonant crisp, each vowel pure, no laziness or carelessness.
“A gentleman would honor the request of a lady.”
“I am no gentleman.” He brushed a hand over his shoulder. “And you, my lady, are in a place far from polite society.”
“You’re deflecting.” Selene quelled the brittle fear inside her. She didn’t know where she was or what he was or who he was.And she needed to. She needed more of him the way she needed music and magic and air. “Your name, sir.”
“Will you stop at nothing to have it?”
Selene put on her best performer’s smile. “Better tell me now and save yourself the trouble.”
The laugh rolled from deep within him, like distant thunder. And that’s when Selene was sure. He was real. However stars burn, Selene knew the difference between real and dreams.
“I have no name.”
He was toying with her. Selene could play this game—and part of her wanted to—but she was unsettled by the way the darkness pressed in.
