Show me more.
The image shifts and we’re in a dim bedroom. The bedclothes are a tangle of dark silks, and Emmett’s pale form lies stark among them.
Lady Thalia crawls across the bed to him on her hands and knees. With agonizing, methodical slowness, she undoes the buttons on his shirt one by one.
His eyes are dark and desolate. The bruises beneath them have never looked bluer.
I don’t want to watch, but everywhere I turn, there they are. I try to close my eyes, but I can’t stop seeing. I’m without a body, without eyelids to close. The only thing I can do is witness. The force of it carries me away like I’m being swept out to sea.
She lays her head on his chest and smiles like a cat that has caught a fat mouse. “We’re going to have so much fun together.”
Show me more.I have to see; I have to know the truth.
The room shifts again and again until I’m dizzy with it. I’d be vomiting if I had a body, but I am nothing, no one but these memories.
Lady Thalia dancing with Emmett at a revel, her pupils blown out and glassy while he stares blankly at the ceiling.
“You’ve never made a bargain?” Lady Thalia asks, one perfecteyebrow quirked. Emmett shakes his head and she smiles venomously. “Then I’m honored to be your first. Let’s make it a good one.”
Then they’re in a dark room, standing opposite each other, a third person in navy robes between them. The room is lit with thousands of candles flickering against the dark.
Emmett takes Lady Thalia by the hands. A garnet ring on her finger glints in the firelight.
Emmett tilts his head up to the ceiling, then looks back at her.“I do.”
Something inside of me shatters.
But before I can even understand what I’m seeing—what he’sdoing—the room shifts again.
More. I need to know more.
He’s with Lydia, sitting on the chair in her room in front of the fireplace. His legs are slung over the armrests, his head in his hands. His hair is getting longer and the bruises under his eyes are worse.
Lydia’s face is red and pinched with fury. “You married her!” she screams, and Emmett flinches. “You promised me you’d never make a bargain, and then you went and made the worst possible one.”
“A political marriage. I did it to protect you.” He sounds so dejected.
“You fed yourself to the wolves!”
“She’s angry Bram cast her aside for you. She only wants to get him back. She took the changeling proposal off the table immediately. She’s convinced three lords to stay here instead of going with Bram to England to torture humans. Already I’m getting more respect at court. I didn’t know what else to do!”
“Anything but this!” Lydia shouts. “You deserve real love, Emmett.”
“Ivy’s gone.” Emmett’s voice goes quiet and his eyes well with tears. “Ivy’s gone and she’s not coming back, so let me do this. Let me help you.”
More. Please.Even in my own head, my voice is nothing more than a broken whisper.
The scene lurches and I’m back in Lady Thalia’s room. It’s unbearable, but I have to know more.
Emmett is asleep in bed next to her and rolls over, exposing the long column of his throat. There, fresh and red, is the bruise I left when I bit him at the revel.
This memory is recent, I realize. It happened the night we were both dosed with love potion. There’s his long hair, his single earring, his familiar doublet discarded on the floor.
It’s like my heart has been replaced with a hot coal and it’s burning everything around it, ruining it until it crumbles to ash.
It would be one thing if Emmett had taken other lovers while I was gone and he believed me to be dead, but to be in another woman’s bed just days ago is devastating in a way I didn’t anticipate. For the first time, I hope that maybe I am dead. That way I won’t have to go back and face him.
My heart isn’t broken seeing a version of Emmett who doesn’t love me back, it’s that it no longer matters if he loves me. That’s beside the point. He’s gone from me, and I have to watch it all play out, vivid and gruesome in its detail.
