At the sound of his name, those green eyes flare. They burn like faint torchlights in the dusky room.
I’m definitely pushing it.
“The mother I remember,” he starts as he reclines in the tub, hooking one arm behind his head like a pillow, “is no mother at all. That felt much like loss.”
I itch to tell him to shove his own emotion bubble up his arse.
I don’t give a shit about his pain, his mother, his father, his anything.
I feel mine.
I only feel mine.
“You don’t know loss,” I tell him.
And something runs over him. A darkness, a shadow, a silent threat.
Hand rested on the edge of the tub, his thumb twitches—and I remember how it ran over the hilt of his glassy dagger.
A cold feeling runs through me.
His instinct, I forget, is still dangerous.
I let myself get too relaxed, too lulled.
And way too mouthy.
I turn for the sink, just for something to distract myself with, and start washing off the facemask.
The burn of his stare is ice-cold on my back.
It doesn’t fade, doesn’t drift away.
He stares into me, through me, for so long that, when he speaks, my shoulders jerk with the fright.
“Ísabroch,” he says, and it’s an utterly foreign word to me, one he emphasises before he goes on, “is an isle north of Dorcha. An isle of mountains, glaciers, cliffs, ice melts, snow, blizzards—and a race of fae, the only fae in existence who can survive there.”
I think of Antarctica.
But somehow harsher.
“There is no vegetation or wildlife on the land, there are no running rivers or lakes unfrozen.”
Disbelief twists my wet face. “Then how do your people survive?”
It’s not possible.
“Visiting wildlife come in warmer seasons. My kind emerge to hunt on the shores and in the sea. The cold season returns, preserves the meat, and water can be made from ice.”
I drag the towel off my hair, then run it over my face. “Don’t you freeze?”
His face softens, faintly amused. “No.”
I watch water drizzle from the soft strands of his hair, along his nose, over his lashes, down his cheeks, and I think of a lovely statue lost in the mist of a garden rain.
He continues, “The best territories are fought over in every cold season. These are close to the shores for hunting, and with caves for shelter, and on mountains easy to scale. My mother and father had a territory good enough to breed in.
“While my mother slept through her gestation and my father watched over her, another pair attacked. My mother fled to the shore where she birthed me. Dorcha whalers noticed her corpse, and the babe in her fresh blood.
