The smirk slides off Vale’s face. He blinks, the casual, leaning posture of his body stiffening into something rigid and terrible. “Bring him back,” he repeats slowly.
“Kael,” I clarify, my voice trembling but gaining volume. “Do you have the power to resurrect him?”
He stares at the grave, and then at me. His expression twists into something concerning. Something petty.
“You wanthimback?” His voice drips with disdain, and beneath it, a current of searing heat. “Why would you want him breathing again?”
There’s no answering that in any truthful way without revealing that this bargain stands on a lie. “My reasons are my own. Surely sharing them isn’t a requirement for you to pay up.”
A symphony of brittle cracks echoes through the graveyard as the grass beneath us turns ghostly white. The frost doesn’t just coat the blades, it entombs them; the chill shooting up through the soles of my boots, biting through the leather with stinging numbness.
Before I can stumble back, Vale’s hands snap up to bracket my face. The grip is ruthless, his palms pressing against my cheeks with the weight and finality of a coffin lid slamming shut, trapping me in the cold with him. He lowers his forehead until it rests against mine, the contact burning like ice, his eyes searching mine with a terrifying, fractured intensity.
“Pathetic.” The rage in his voice cuts the air like sleet. “You stand before Death, owed a wish that could topple fate itself, and you ask for the return ofhim?” His eyes darken. “Was he your lover, Elara? Did you let him put his hands on you after you denied mine, hmm? Is that why you wept on his grave? Did his death break your stupid, mortal heart?” His thumbs press until flesh meets molars. “Do you love him!?” he roars, the sound vibrating through the soles of my feet. “You stand before a god, and you pine for the rotting flesh of a man?”
Fear rips through me so hard it rattles my lungs, stealing the air in a jagged pull. For a moment, I’m nothing but bone and breath trapped between his hands, my pulse hammering against his palms while confusion whirls through my skull.
The way his thumbs dig into my flesh, the wild, wounded accusation, the way his eyes blacken under the rising moonlight with sheer possessiveness—none of this is the reaction of a god fooled.
It’s the jealousy of a lover scorned.
No, impossible. He cannot love. He has no heart to give and apparently, no wish to get its string back. So, whatever this is, it’s not tenderness.
It’s arrogance. It’s ownership.
It’s possessiveness that tries to make me shrink, tries to control me. And I’ll be damned if I let myself be bullied by his stupid, wounded pride.
I lift my chin against his grip, forcing my breath back into my chest, and meet his gaze. “Can you bring him back or not?”
For one heartbeat, he just stares at me, wide-eyed, as if the strike of my question could make even a god bleed. Two seconds. Three. The pressure of his hands increases until my teeth ache. Then, as if he realizes what he’s doing—what he’s showing—his grip breaks.
His hands fall away.
The cold rushes in where his touch had been, and I draw a harsh, greedy breath that stings my throat. Vale turns from me sharply, shoulders rigid beneath velvet, as though the sight of my face is suddenly too much to bear without losing whatever thin mask of composure he has left. He rakes a hand through his curls. Smooths his cuffs. Stares past the headstones into nothing.
When he finally speaks, his voice is stripped of all emotion, a hollowed-out echo of the man who was just shouting in my face. “No.”
“No?”
He doesn’t look at me. His gaze fixes on a sliver of moonlight cutting across the frosted grass, right beside his boot. “Even if I were inclined to grant such a waste…Kael has been cold for hours. He has been dead too long.”
My heart gives a violent lurch.Too long.Notimpossible.I step toward his back, unable to stop myself.
“But that means…” I trail off, my mind racing. “That means it’s possible? You can bring someone back?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even acknowledge the question. He simply turns around, his face smoothed into a strange blank mask, the rage of a moment ago buried beneath layers of ancient, impenetrable ice.
“What is your wish, Elara?” he asks, clipped and cold, as if he had not just stood here with his hands on my face and rage in his throat. “Choose it. Now.”
The demand hangs in the air, a blade waiting to drop, but my mind is a whirl. Every wish I conjure—health, wealth, power—feels like a mistake I refuse to make.
My silence seems to unnerve him. He shifts his weight, agitated. His boots crunch on the frozen grass as he takes a step to the left, then another to the right, pacing.
No, not pacing.
Dodging.
The clouds above are thinning, tattered rags revealing the rising, blinding face of the moon, and beams of silver light are beginning to pierce the cemetery canopy like spears.
