Death goes absolutely still, looking down at me with shock-choked eyes. He doesn’t breathe, doesn’t move. He just watches, paralyzed by the intrusion.
“It’s…actually broken,” I whisper, my thumb brushing the scarred, uneven surface of the muscle.
“Destroyed,” he corrects, his voice a hollow shell of sound. “Hanging on by merely a hair of a thread of my last remaining heartstring. The second, I accidentally tore completely in my rage, while the third pulses in your crown.”
I narrow my eyes, squinting in the gloom. “That’s not what I’m seeing,” I murmur, tracing the distinct artery. “The second string is shredded, alright. But the first one…it seems intact. Strong, even.”
Death stares at me, and the black void of his eyes suddenly seems to…deepen? In a blur of motion, he clamps his hand around my wrist and yanks. He pulls my hand out of him, his chest heaving, looking at me with a strange, almost frantic expression that chills me more than any grave ever has.
“Is it… Is it true?” I ask carefully. “Can you really not feel love?”
He swallows. I watch the gray tendon in his throat work, a hard, painful movement. “I feel joy,” he says hoarsely. “I feel… some sadness. I feel blinding anger. And…lust.” His gaze drops to my mouth, darkening for a brief second. “I cannot feel love.”
A profound, aching sadness washes over me, heavier than it should. “What kind of existence is that?” I ask softly. “To live without love?”
Death looks at me for a long moment. Then, his form begins to dissipate. He melts into the night, but the grating rasp of his voice echoes through the clearing one last time.
“A sane one.”
Chapter
Twelve
Death
The mirrors in this palace have rarely reflected truth.
They were made for kings who wanted to look powerful instead of guilty, and queens who wanted to look adored instead of doomed. Glass is a willing liar. It will take whatever you offer it and hand it back in a shape you can survive.
Tonight, the mirror in Elara’s chamber refuses to cooperate.
The candle flames in this room are stingy, puddled and dull, thrown from lonesome wicks that my wife forgot to snuff before she fell asleep. The light doesn’t flatter me. Never has.
Vale’s handsome face is gone, the borrowed perfection mortals have always found so easy to want. A tool. A way to walk among the living without their minds melting at the sight of what I truly am. And yet there’s something severely wrong with the reflection before me.
Not in my face.
In. My. Chest.
I lower my gaze and, with a motion that should feel casual but instead feels like a man checking a lethal wound, I slip my fingers under the edge of my ribs and reach into my chest. And there, hanging within the open cage, is my heart.
Scar tissue. Damaged nerves.
It hangs, broken and half-numb, held by a single heartstring that should be barely intact, stretched near snapping in the way a hair does when it’s been left under strain too long.
Only it isn’t.
The thread is…wrong.
Because the reflection of it looks just right—a fresh, crimson vitality that wraps around a valve that ought to be damaged. It thickens the connection, holding the once near-severed thread together with such strength that the organ barely shifts when I cup it. Worse yet, it gives a heavy, wholesome pulse against my palm.
Once.Ba-boom.
Twice.Ba-boom.
I freeze, fingers tightening instinctively as if to stop it. It doesn’t listen. It beats again, stronger than it has in centuries. How can this be?
I yank my hand out and brace it against the edge of the vanity, cold sweat settling on the little skin my skull possesses. My heart is healing—and with it, the full, agonizing spectrum of the one thing I’ve avoided since the dawn of my fear.
