I try to bring moisture to my dry lips. “I need you to help me figure that out.”
I expect a return of his disbelief, rage, suspicion, and distrust. Anticipating it, I hurry to add, “You told me I must ask for help if I want it. Well, I need your help.”
His eyes narrow, but I refuse to look away.
The expected rage doesn’t eventuate.
His hand continues to circle my arm as he asks, “Tell me what you see of me in your visions.”
He’s testing me. I sense it.
“My first vision was of you,” I say.
The corner of his mouth hitches up as if this amuses him. “A likely story meant to play to my ego.”
“It was of iron,” I continue, ignoring his skepticism. “I was covered in iron dust. Chains were wrapped around me, and I was trying to tear them from my body because I was burning. So badly. But not with pain. It was…”
His thumb grazes across the inside of my elbow, a quiet sensation that feels anything but soothing now.
“It was what?” he prompts, leaning closer still.
“It was need.”
I swallow, try to shake myself, but I can’t tear myself from his gaze. All the pain he promises me with those wild, green eyes. Pain and maybe…
Something else.
My voice is barely audible. “I couldn’t quench it.”
His bare hand skims my biceps to the edge of my tunic sleeve before trailing up across my shoulder and then lifting off me, his palm now close to my cheek.
“I wonder,” he murmurs. “If breaking the curse could be as simple as quenching that need?”
Chapter Thirty-One
Antony
Could breaking the curse be as simple as fucking her?
I have all night.
If I can curb the poison in my heart, I’m certain I could stir her blood and make her want this.
More than once today, I’ve wondered what it would be like to hear her moan, tip her over the edge, and find out if her entire body tastes like roses.
But I’m also certain it could never be that simple. She’s bound to have been fucked by somebody already, and the fact that I’m a king, well, I can’t imagine it would make some magically divine difference.
Which means I have a decision to make: Whether or not I believe she doesn’t already know how to break the curse.
Fuck it, but I want to believe her.
The desperation with which she tried to gouge the blade out of her arm, back on the roof. The sharp clack as her teeth closed over the circlet’s links against her wrist. A second longer, and its serrations would have triggered and done their horrific work. It reminded me ofthe way she was willing to risk her hand to leap over stalactites back at the village. Just as she was willing to risk her limb tonight.
What this tells me is irrefutable: She wants to escape.
Like a trapped animal, she would gnaw off her paw to do it.
If she could break the curse and secure her freedom, she’d do that too.
