I’m acutely aware of the wall rising across Thyra’s expression, a wall that began building when we started talking about Antony.
Her whisper is heavy. “I guess we’ll never know.”
The final bite of food on my plate remains uneaten. My frost power makes my fingertips cold.
Thyra and I haven’t spoken about Antony’s death.
We’ve skirted around it, never addressing it directly.
Now I cast caution to the wind and ask her the question that has lurked at the back of my mind for hours. A question that could shatter the peace between us.
“When did you know?”
She understands exactly what I’m asking, her next inhalation dragging into her chest like steel rasping across iron. “I didn’t know he was a vampyr until it was too late.”
“Too late to save yourself.”
The corners of her mouth turn down. “Too late to help him.”
My eyes narrow as I wonder: what is the cost ofherhelp?
But I ask the question that plagues me more, a question that will tell me how much Antony’s memory will influence her decisions and actions going forward. “Why did you want to?”
Why did she ask—no,beg—me to spare his life?
How did a fae like Antony, who cloaked himself in black steel and lived his life in a state of endless rage, forge a bond with a woman whose heart has so many layers, I don’t think I can ever know them all?
A bond strong enough that, despite the vampyric poisonclearly consuming his mind, he used his final breath to ask her for forgiveness.
She’s pale. Tense. Pressed up against the wall. “That’s between him and me.”
A valid response, but it tells me nothing.
I listen to her pounding heart and wait for her to rage at me, to ask me how I could strike him down when he was already on his knees, to rail at me for my heartlessness, to accuse me of denying my people the food they need in a moment of cold violence.
But she…remains silent. Presses her palms to the wall. Turns her face away. Her chest rises and falls. Fast and then slower.
She becomes impossibly quiet. Soul-crushingly reserved.
Inwardly, I ridicule myself. I told her the sounds she makes matter. But now it’s the screams sheisn’tuttering that matter the most.
I’m certain the time will come when she loosens her hold on her emotions.
When she feels stronger. When she finds her place in my kingdom. Once I’ve given her all of the tools she needs to destroy me.
She will confront me.
I’m certain of it.
And by then, I’ll have no defenses.
Chapter Forty-Four
Thyra
My heart hurts.
Every time Stellen spoke Antony’s name, it was like a cut inflicted across my heart until I had to close off my feelings, creating a shield around everything that Antony meant to me, just like the shield that kept me from falling apart after my father’s death.
