My sister has cautioned against getting too close to my soul-fated if I have any future hope of rejecting the bond. While I have played with her before, unable to resist the offer of her delectable body in her seductive dreams, I must allow myself to feel nothing. She is a beautiful inconvenience and a pleasurable distraction, no more than that.
Anything else, and the cost will be untenable.
“Why have you called me?” I growl.
“I didn’t want to be alone,” she replies. “I have no one. Not Roshan, not Clem. Not even Vena. But I knew you would come. You always do. You never forsake me.”
I frown. “Vena?”
“The Royal Star,” she says. “My guardian. She visits me sometimes, though I haven’t seen her in a while, and I think I imagined the last time. Perhaps she has abandoned me, too.” She drops her head onto her knees with a broken sound. “I’ve gotten myself into a mess. Sands, I am afool. I trusted them with my magic and my heart, and they trapped me. Not they.Him.”
She doesn’t continue for a long beat, the wind howling like a dying animal between us as the tides rage in tandem with her emotions, battering the shoreline.
“I don’t know who he is anymore. Or perhaps I never did.” Her voice breaks on the last word, her pain so visceral that an earsplitting peal of thunder nearly drowns out her next ones. “Can you stay with me for a little while? Please.”
Despite my forced ambivalence, my chest squeezes at the sound of her pain, and the beast inside of me flexes his claws in warning. It won’t take much to set the curse off, not with her volatile state and her cursed connection to me. It’s a risk I cannot take.
Not now.
My sister’s wise counsel thrums in my head.
I grind my teeth and yank my uncooperative, protesting shadows back to me.Enough, you’ve seen her. She’s alive and unharmed.There’s nothing we can do.They struggle and seethe and tear against my control, even stinging me with their displeasure, but I stand firm.
“Please...” she whispers.
“I cannot,” I say, watching her shoulders slump and her faint starlight dim with defeat.
It might be cruel to leave her this way, but distance is for the best.
At least, that’s what I tell myself.
Chapter Eight
True to the king’s word, my door is unlocked by the next morning.
Or at least I don’t hear the lock click when the handmaiden leaves after delivering the silver salver with a steaming pot of tea and a basket of pastries to the table near the window. I shake myself awake, feeling oddly worn out from the dreams that had plagued me.
My skin feels numb and tight as if I’d spent much of the night shivering with cold. I remember snatches of a terrible storm over the ocean and that my dream companion had made an appearance but refused to stay.
I’dbeggedhim.
Swallowing hard, I squash the instant feelings of self-contempt. It was a dream, nothing more—my own inner consciousness echoing the actions of those I trusted. But still, deep down, even his rejection leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, as if I’m not even worthy of a figment of my own pathetic imagination.
Forget him, too, then.
Stretching my sore muscles, I rise and stare at the undisturbed other side of the bed. Roshan did not sleep in the bedroom, nor was I informed where he’d spent the night. Truth be told, I was glad to be alone, because I probably would have suffocated him in his sleep. Then revived him so I could do it again.
I huff a self-deprecating bark of laughter. As angry and vengeful as I feel, I know I could never hurt him. Not as much as he’s willfully hurting me. Even as I revile the unrecognizable rigid monarch he has become, my heart mourns the gentle lover I lost.
When I pad over to crack open my door, six armed guards are standing in silence in the hallway, and I sigh in defeat. I’m sure there will be six more waiting for when I step foot outside the palace. These walls that had started to feel like home now feel like a gilded cage. Despite Roshan’s words, Iama prisoner here.
The starsdamned cuffs are a testament to that.
Betrayal surges anew. I’d felt so sorry for Razulek, seeing him restrained like a wild beast, and now, the same has been done to me. Like him, I’m unpredictable and dangerous—not just to enemies of the crown buttothe crown. If, for some outlandish reason, I decide I want the throne myself, there’s nothing any of them will be able to do about it. Roshan and Aran can claim that keeping me here is for my own safety all they want... but these magical shackles are for them.
Despair fills me as I pace the bedchamber. Gods, I need to get out of here, and if I can’t do so with magic, I need to come up with something else. I’m strong and somewhat fit, and this bedchamber is not too far up. In fact, I’m certain I saw a trellis near my balcony. Exhaling with newfound resolve, I try those doors, half expecting them to be locked. To my surprise, they are not, though the sight of more soldiers training directly on the lawn below throws a wrench into my plans. Clem is front and center in the middle of them, running the drills.
I clench my teeth hard at the sight of her, her perfidy still fresh. I’d thought she was my friend, but at the heart of it, she’ll follow the king’s orders without question. She told me as much, after all. Help won’t be coming from her. As if feeling the weight of my stare, Clem’s eyes glance up, colliding with mine, and I see the raw guilt on her face before she shutters it, but I can’t bring myself to care. I harden my gaze and turn away.
