I will push Antony’s death away because I have to.
As a mire of conflicted emotions churns within me, I have no choice but to become blank.
A void into which I allow physical need to pour, filling the gaps in my heart. Solace of a different kind.
Stellen told me to come out of the water, and he’ll show me what he wants from me.
To that, I issue my own challenge. “I’ll come out when you give me something warm to wear.”
The slump in his shoulders eases. He rises taller while a slow smile grows on his pale lips, his gaze falling across me where my nearly naked body must be clearly visible beneath the water.
“I will give you warm clothes,” he says. “But there may come a time when I will ask you to take them off.”
A flush of heat ripples through my core at how openly he speaks—as clearly as his gaze devours me.
He reaches for the nearest fur, a plush coat wrapped around the skeleton of a long-dead fae. He stoppedtrying to conceal the bodies from me a while ago. The old bones aren’t gruesome, but I avoid looking too hard at them all the same.
Among them, I don’t see any blades. I’m not sure what the Alak-Teah will have done with the weapons, but from my Oracle vision, I’m certain each fae who came here had one. Perhaps the blades are buried deep, where they can’t be unearthed.
Before his hand closes around the fur, Stellen pauses, then rises to his full height again, abandoning the coat.
He turns back to the cocoon, his eyes suddenly gleaming.
Crossing the short distance to the ovoid frame, he runs his hands through the air around its surface.
“I wonder,” he says, his lips pursing.
From my vantage point to the left of the structure, I can make out multiple strands winding from the back of the cocoon into the mist.
Tether points.
He doesn’t seem unaware of them, running his hand from the main body to the tethers, appearing to study the thick weave.
His arms drop to his sides, and his head tilts.
He’s now standing with his back to me, but he suddenly twists, casting me an otherworldly smile.
“Stand up,” he says.
I scowl at him. “Too cold.”
“Only for a short moment.”
He peers at me for a charged heartbeat, his unearthly smile unfading as I continue to defy him, staying exactly where I am.
“Stand up,” he whispers, but this time, his voice chimes across the space between us, an alluringly beautiful note.
My legs propel me upward, my eyes widening at how easily he used his power to command my body.
I gasp as the cold air hits my arms and chest. My upwardmovement catches the nearest silver flower, which unwinds at my touch, wrapping around my wrist before sliding up my arm, then down between my breasts.
Stellen’s gaze follows the flower’s path before his focus rakes from my head past my waist, where it meets the water and beneath the surface to my toes.
Taking only a short moment just as he promised, he turns away from me, tilting his head and tucking his hair behind his pointed ears as he studies the cocoon again.
I sink back into the warmth, but now I push toward the water’s edge, closer to him, unnerved by how casually he used his Lethian power on me.
I’m certain he wants me to know how easily he could control me. How blithely. And how sharply against my own will.
