He had cut off every connection to the other realms, every avenue of wanting, every hope of seeing anything else in the world except for what was already in this room.
The shimmer at his cheekbone stillled.
Only you, it said. Only ever you. He was solid now, anchored in himself, the watcher who had chosen to be seen.
“You can let go,” he said. “Of your want. You already own the book—you wrote it. She, Margot, owns nothing. The work now belongs to the readers, and—separate to the author, your work is touching people, moving them. It doesn’t matter who wrote it or whose name is on the cover. The book, the work, it exists in the world on its own terms.” He took his arms. “I feel her heart, Baby, I feel her soul. Margot. I make you this promise. She is envious ofyou. She doesn’t feel as though she owns the book. She doesn’t feel as though she deserves any of it. Darling, she is miserable.”
I felt the truth behind his words and then, for the first time, something beautiful. Not pity for Margot. Compassion.
“It’s time for you to let go,” he said, “of envy. You don’t need anything more, you already have it all.”
He was right.
I held him, folded my hands over the line of his jaw, and kissed him.
I put everything into it. He took it the way a dying man takes a breath. He let the colors of the bond run through him, into the hollow of his throat and down into the root of his tongue.
We knelt together at the rim of the sealed lake, holding each other in the dark, the only light in the room the color of the bond itself.
Hecarriedmebackto his chamber—not the room with the wood walls, but the true bedchamber, the one at the bottom of the palace, the one with the hearth so wide you could fall into it. The fire was up. It filled the room with a light as rich as blood.
He set me on my feet at the foot of the bed. He looked up, and for the first time I saw that the ceiling was not stone at all, but a canopy veiled in dark silk. The fabric was drawn taut across a frame, so that the bed below was cased in a gentle, diffused gloom. He reached up and, with a single patient motion, drew the cloth aside.
Above us, the entire ceiling was a mirror.
Not a panel, not an oval, not even the pearled silver of the palace halls. It was a single seamless surface, flawless as water, running the length of the canopy. I saw, reflected there, the bed: wide as a king’s, dressed in a honey-colored coverlet, the darkshadow of the man standing at my side, the pale shadow of the girl in his shirt.
The air in the room went electric.
He knelt in front of me, at the end of the bed. The black of his coat was a void at my knees, the shimmer at his cheekbone a gold that ran down and through his neck, his hands alive with the heat of his own want. He reached for the hem of the shirt, unbuttoned it, one button at a time, slow. At each undone button, he paused, as though there were a holy name written underneath, and then moved to the next. At the top of the split, he drew his hands apart, peeling the two halves down from my shoulders and letting them drop to my elbows, then forearms, then wrists, then hands. The shirt fell to the floor. My breasts went bare in the firelight.
He made a sound.
It was not human. It was not demon. It was the sound of an animal recognizing, at last, the scent of its mate.
He put his hands at the tops of my thighs and pulled me, gentle, toward him. He pressed his mouth to my navel. He pressed his mouth to the underside of my left breast, then the right, then to the small white scar along the base of my ribcage, the one I had gotten from a fall in gym class. He mouthed the bone, the bruise, the skin.
He said, “I want every part of you.”
He licked the underside of the left breast, ran the tip of his tongue up to the nipple, drew the nipple into his mouth and sucked, slow, until it went hard enough to hurt. My knees almost gave out. He did it to the right breast, too, but this time he used his teeth. He grazed the skin, just enough for the bond to respond, the flare running up my chest and into my mouth.
He lowered his head and tongued the hollow below my ribs, then my hipbone, then the soft inside of my thigh.
He looked up, the color at his cheekbone brighter than any gold I had seen on him. “Get on the bed,” he said.
I did.
I lay on my back, thighs open, hair a wild tangle on the pillow, and looked up.
The mirror took me.
The girl on the bed—her hair splayed like a star, her breasts high with fever, her thighs parted, her eyes alive—was not a girl I had seen before. She looked like a vision, or a creature summoned, or a queen left alone for the first time with her own body. She looked hungry.
He stood at the foot of the bed.
He kicked off his boots.
He unfastened the trousers, sliding them down over his hips and stepping out of them with a steadiness that bordered on the predatory.
