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“We have numbers, though. If a war is coming. They will want us on their side. Our numbers are greater than Emberfall’s, despite the dragons having a clear advantage from the air. But if Avelvorn brings war to one of them, they don’t stand a chance without us. From what I gathered, Kaiser has gone quiet, so that is why Zander asked about alliances. I know he is worried about war. Xavian can’t stand Zander or Draven; that is no secret, so that leaves only our kingdom to be in his corner if war breaks out.”

Garret sighs heavily. “Well, if you are going back to Purgatory. Perhaps next time you visit, you might find a mage in one of the derelict stores. Someone to fix what is broken so we don’t have to make alliances with mongrel mutts.” His tone suggests bitter sarcasm, a dark joke you make when you’ve exhausted every real solution and the absurd ones are all that remain. He doesn’t even look at me when he says it.

But I stop.

The word detonates in my skull. I have known and failed to see something that has been sitting directly in front of me for days. Yet I have been so focused on the bond that I have forgotten who she truly is.

Alessia is a mage.

My mage.

But I have been thinking of her as my bond. My blood source. My curse’s cure. I have been so consumed by what she is to me, that I forgot what she could be to the world.

She is the last daughter of a bloodline that once kept my kingdom alive.

Mages are tied to the elements, to the forces that make things live instead of die. They were the balance to a thriving world.

I know she has power, but she has to want to help, and right now, the only thing she wants is to get as far from me as the ocean allows. To find her sister, to return to the life I tore her from. Then I remember the child on the boat she demanded my shirt for.

If she sees what I see, the sick children, the humans who are lining up for dwindling rations, the island collapsing into the sea, she won’t be able to look away. Not because I’ll force her to look, but because that is who she is. Beneath her anger, grief, and the hatred she carries for me and my kind, there is a woman who will see herself in their faces because she was one of them.

Here she doesn’t have to hide who she truly is or what she is capable of, and I am eager to see just that. Yet standing here where no one can hear me admit it, I know the truth is smaller and more dangerous than strategy.

I do not want her power.

I want the way she argued with me on the boat as if I were a man and not a monster.

The way she gave her cloak to a sick child without weighing the cost.

The way she looked at me once, before she remembered to hate me.

I just want her.

CHAPTER 37

• Alessia •

BEFORE MY EYES open, the door does, and for a disoriented heartbeat, I don’t know where I am.

The mattress beneath me is too soft. The air smells wrong, clean and cold instead of the thick stench of livestock and hay. The absence of familiar misery drags me into consciousness faster than any alarm.

My pulse hammers as I sit up too quickly, and the room swims into focus. The burgundy velvet canopy surrounding the bed. The faint orange glow of dying embers in the grand hearth. The Vampire King’s bedroom. I peer around to find what woke me.

Eagan noisily steps through the door carrying a tray, and the scent hits me before I can process anything else. He sets the food on the small table near the window that looks out over the barren land to the vast sea. My gaze snags on the other side of the bed. The sheets are smooth, pillow untouched, and the heavy coverlet is still folded in the exact position it was in when I crawled under the opposite side last night. No wrinkles, indent, no trace of another body.

“The king didn’t return,” I say, and the words leave my mouth before my brain has time to approve them.

Eagan straightens from the table, his eerie red eyes finding mine. “He’s handling kingdom matters.”

“What sort of matters?”

“The sort you can see for yourself,” he says. “Once you eat.”

With a heavy sigh, I force myself out of bed and move to the table. I eat every bite while Eagan moves about the room, setting clothes out for me. My brows scrunch as he lays them on the bed. It’s as if he thinks I’m incapable of dressing myself. I should be used to it, but I figured this treatment would stop once we reached the kingdom and he had more important matters to tend to.

Eagan’s setting out clothes like he’s prepping a corpse. Underthings, boots, even a brush and hair tie in a neat little row like I’m a pathetic decorative doll. It makes my skin crawl.

“You know, I do have two hands,” I say, and it comes out way bitchier than I mean.