“If you are not my fated mate,” he said, “then the bond between us will not answer. If the Veil has made an error, the error will reveal itself, immediately, and I will open the door foryou and you will go home to Spokane Valley, and you will never see me again, and I will remember your face in private.”
He raised his right hand.
It was steady. The fingers were long. The palm was open and turned toward me, how a person offers a palm to a horse they want to come near.
“There is a bond,” he said. “Between us. The Rite has set it, the Veil has confirmed it, and I believe—I am not asking you to believe, I am telling you that I believe—that it will activate the moment we touch. Hand to hand. Skin to skin. If it does not, you are right, and I am wrong, and I will release you with my whole apology. If it does, you will know. You will know in your body before your mind has caught up. You will not have to take my word for it.”
He waited.
He let the hand stay there.
The cold under my sternum and the heat over it met in the middle and made something I did not have a word for.
What if he was right?
What if I touched him and it answered? What if there was a bond? What if I was, in fact, the woman the Veil had opened for, and the nine years I had spent making myself the size of a coat hook in a rink lobby had been—
I could not finish the thought.
I could not let myself finish it.
“Maria.”
My name. He said it for the first time.
“Do you want to find out?”
His eyes held mine.
“Do you still have enough pride left,” he said, “to find out who you really are?”
I tried to summon her.
I tried to find the girl. The girl who had lifted her chin a quarter-inch on the long opening glide in Tokyo.
I could not find her.
She was there. I could feel the heat of her, the shape of where she had been. But the door was closed and the door had been closed for nine years and my hand on the handle was somebody else’s hand, and I could not, could not, could not open it.
I shook my head.
“I can’t.”
The words came out cracked.
“I’m sorry, my Lord. I can’t. I can’t do it. I have to go.”
I turned.
I turned on the marble in my doubled white trainers, away from him, away from the offered hand, back the way I had come, toward the place in the colonnade where there had to be a way out, where the Veil had to still be, where Spokane Valley was on the other side, where the rink was, where Saturday morning would come around again in six days and Theo would put the wrong boot on the wrong foot and I would crouch down and fix it and that was the woman I was, that was who I was, that was—
My right blade went on the wrong edge.
That is the only way I can describe it.
There was no blade. I was in trainers. There was no ice. I was on cold gold-veined marble. But my body did the thing it had done in Tokyo. The right foot went out from under me on an edge that was not there. The shoulder opened a quarter-turn too early. The crowd held its breath. There were no spectators in the hall and the hall held its breath anyway. I felt the air over the top of the jump that I was not doing. I felt the cold. I felt the wrong edge.
I felt the right knee go in instead of out.
