If she isn’t prepared to strike at all times, my kingdom will destroy her.
My hands tighten around her, the echo of my worst memory thrumming through my mind.
I tell myself she’s vulnerable in my arms. I don’t even have to use my Voice. All it will take is a trickle of frost power through my fingertips, and I will crack whatever fragile trust she has in me.
Too easily, I could prove to her how quickly peace can turn to pain. It would take only a single burst of power, and she would shatter in my arms.
But that isn’t the shattering I want for her right now. I want her moans of pleasure to wash over me again, cutting out my cruelty, smothering it.
My lips move to hers.
I force myself to stop before I make contact.
I remind myself: she must always come to me.
Always because she wants to.
While I pause there, my breathing ragged, another tear slides down her cheek.
“You could not have spoken like you did,” she says, “unless you had experienced incredible pain yourself. I’m sorry about your family, Stellen.”
I draw a sharp breath.
Nobody has ever said such a thing to me. Nobody mourned them but me.
And now I realize how much I’ve given away.
I had thought only of making Thyra understand what it will take to survive. I didn’t think about the story I was revealing to her through my songs and my words…
I ask myself what other stories I’ve exposed since I started humming all the way back in the bloodlands.
I want to warn her that just because I’ve felt pain in the past doesn’t mean I won’t deliver it.
Yet…all I want to do is stay still. Listen to her heartbeats. Accept that she spoke the truth. Accept the trusting pressure of her body against mine. Accept the depth of the sadness in her voice.
Even if I can’t feel grief anymore. Even if that destructive emotion can’t touch me now.
Very slowly, so I don’t startle her, I press my forehead to hers, a light pressure, but a certain one.
She closes her eyes, her heartbeats heavy.
She knows loss.
Her father died only three days ago, and it was clear from the tear stains down her cheeks and the way she shielded his body that his passing struck her hard.
His body lies preserved in the freezing catacombs beneath the Sacred Stone Temple, along with the knife that killed him.
Then she lost Antony.
I’m the reason his heart stopped beating. I remember the finalthumplike a stone dropping onto snow.
He asked me to keep his hope safe, and it was clear he meant Thyra.
The enormity of his request only now strikes me.
Myenemyasked me to keep someone precious to him safe. As if he believed, not only that I could, but that I fucking would.
A weight settles in my heart. A stone heavier than Antony’s last thudding heartbeat.
