They stitch themselves together into black cloth. It ripples through the air before it settles into velvet and black curls, darkness weaving rapidly into the shape of Vale.
“Wife,” he purrs, and the word is not affectionate. “You have gates full of mourners. Floodwater full of corpses. A brother drowning in rot.” A lopsided smirk lets his teeth flash. “Tell me…do you love me yet?”
Chapter
Eight
Elara
Tell me…do you love me yet?
Heat floods my veins with such speed, my entire body itches when my eyes lock with the green of his. “We both know you’re making that quite difficult.”
Crossing his arms behind his back, Vale strides out of the shadows, only for his boots to stop where the moon floods the floor. “Oh?”
“Women warned me that husbands get irritating after a while, you know,” I say. “Then mine shows up, annoying me without even a grace period.”
Amusement curls his lips into a lopsided smirk. “Presume there’s always the option of divorce. Some kings have granted a handful in the past. I guess so could a…” His gaze trails over my black corset and down the equally dark silken train. “…a queen.”
“Is that a request?” The smile I work onto my lips is about as sweet as he is annoying. “Denied.”
A muscle jumps in his jaw—a telltale sign of how hard he tries to maintain his smirk—eyes drifting to the silver border on the floor that shines the tip of his boot. The moon is high tonight, full enough to bathe the room.
Full enough to makehimcautious.
“Why don’t you come here to look at the moon with me?” I ask softly, if only to mock him. “It’s illuminating the statue of you in the gardens.”
“I have seen the moon.” A bored kind of exhale. “I have seen it wax and wane for eons. It doesn’t impress me. Close the drapes,wife.”
The command carries more than mere annoyance. It has weight—habitual, practiced, like a man slamming a door before anyone can glimpse what’s behind it. Why?
My mind flicks through scraps of memories. “I dislike the way light invents me when I’m not paying attention,” he once said in that carriage. “Power does not quicken every pulse the way songs promise,”he’d sneered. As if he’d learned long ago that his true form is too appalling to be seen, too horrendous to be desired.
Too disgusting to be loved?
Something shifts inside my core at that thought…
“Why,husband?” A tilt of my head. “Are your bones shy?”
He exhales a long, controlled breath—like he’s forcing himself to rein in his temper already, mere seconds into this conversation. “I asked you to close the drapes.”
I turn around fully, leaning back against the sill. “And I’m asking for the second time now to let me see you. The real you.”
“In twenty to thirty years.”
The longer he stands there, unmoving, the clearer all this becomes. He isn’t protecting me from the sight of him; he’s protecting himself from my reaction. The flinch. The scream.
The rejection.
But what would happen if I didn’t flinch? What would happen if I traced the clean curve of exposed ribs with curiosity? Ran my palm over the pale plains of muscle held together by tendons with fascination? Would he recoil?
Or would he melt into the accepting touch?
As if he read my thoughts, his smirk turns into a sneer. “You are tedious.”
“And you’re vain.”
He straightens, the barb landing exactly where I aimed it. For a heartbeat longer, we just stare at each other—him, an arrogant god refusing to concede an inch, and me, a simple gravedigger refusing to back down. But the stalemate gets boring after a minute, and I have a curse to break.
