“What’s wrong?”
He doesn’t answer. His jaw works, and something fractures behind those black, hollow eyes. Something vast and terrified.
His forehead finds mine. Presses, hard, the ridge of his brow digging into my skin while his breath comes in short, shatteredbursts. I bring my hands to his face, holding him there, and for a long moment, he lets me.
Then I feel him shake his head. A slow, grinding drag of bone against my skin. Not a refusal of me. Something worse.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Shadow curls around him like a closing fist—his cloak materializing from nothing, swallowing the bone and skin and sinew whole.
My hands close on empty air.
Chapter
Nineteen
Elara
Ispent the afternoon in a tub of hot water, scrubbing until my skin turned pink and raw. Not to wash him off. To give my hands something to do while my mind tore itself apart.
Now I lie in bed, the sheets cool against my freshly scrubbed skin, staring at the canopy above me without seeing it. The fire in the hearth has burned down to embers, casting the royal chamber in a low, amber glow.
He vanished.
Not retreated. Not walked away. Vanished—mid-breath, mid-apology, his cloak swallowing him whole while my hands still held the shape of his face.
I roll onto my side, pulling the blanket to my chin. The soreness between my thighs is a dull, warm ache that refuses to let me forget a single detail. The weight of him. The sounds he made. The way his hands shook when he looked down and saw.
“There is a…new element, my love. One I would rather avoid, lest we complicate things further. You, Elara, are starting to bleed again.”
His words from weeks ago surface like a leaf turning over in a riverbed. With the ghost of his warmth still mapped across my skin and his seed tossed out with my bathwater, the pieces slide together with a click as final as a lock.
He didn’t panic because of what we did.
He panicked because of what we might have made. And I think…I think I understand why. It crossed my mind before, after all.
The temperature drops. Not dramatically, just enough to raise the fine hairs along my arms beneath the blanket. A shift in the air, the way a room changes when a door opens somewhere far away, letting in a draft from a place that has no name.
Heel bones click over stone.
Slow. Deliberate.
Fabric thuds heavily to the floor. The blanket shifts. Then, the mattress dips.
Death slides into bed behind me, the length of him pressing against my back—warm skin on one side, smooth bone on the other—and his arm comes around my waist. He pulls me into the curve of his body with a gentleness that makes my throat ache.
His mouth finds my temple. Lingers. “I shouldn’t have left,” he whispers against my skin, his voice low and rough as unfinished wood.
“No.” I keep my eyes closed, my hand settling over his skeletal fingers where they rest against my stomach. “You shouldn’t have.”
A kiss to the hinge of my jaw. Slow. Apologetic. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t want you to disappear.” My voice is smaller than I intend. “I wanted you to stay…like in the tower.”
His arm tightens around me. His forehead drops to the curve of my neck, bone pressing cool against my spine, and I feel his breath shudder out of him in one long, unraveling exhale. “I’m here now.”
I turn in his arms.
