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Perhaps he wants me for now, but not forever.

I hastily redress, silk caressing the tender parts of my skin like lips and whispers and words spoken but not meant.

I should never have brought this up. I should have been satisfied with the night we shared instead of throwing myself at him like some sort of bee to his pollen. Sparks flutter in my peripheral vision. I blink. It’s there one moment, gone the next. A sunflare, maybe?

“I meant every word I said to you,” Quill says quietly, drawing me out of my spiral. “I want you more than anything, Rory. But partaking in the Pledging when we’re not sure what’s to come is unfair to you.”

“Aren’t you tired of letting others dictate how you live your life?” Heat burns behind my eyes as I rise to my feet, putting as much distance between us as possible. I cannot think straight when he is near, cannot think beyond this thrumming in my blood that sings mine mine mine. “I suffered through twenty-three years of never having a choice, and now I finally do and your fear of Mihal is going to stop us?”

“Just because he can’t cause you harm directly doesn’t mean he isn’t a threat.” He sits up and pulls on his clothes. “He could manipulate someone into coming for you. He could defeat me during the Challenge.”

There is an aching in my chest that rages from his reasoning, from this rejection. I lace the ribbon of my gown. Tighter and tighter. Until it is more painful than the raging in my heart.

I endure it.

Even when there’s a sharp, cracking pain along my ribs.

Quill reaches for me, but I shrug him off and turn toward the window. Sun kisses my cheeks as I unlace and relace the ribbon. It’s a different, smaller, pinch of pain. If I were a mortal, I’d faint from the constriction, but I am not a mortal.

I am a vampire, and I will endure many terrible things to come.

A front-lacing corset will not be my undoing.

But this ancient being beside me, the weight of his concerned gaze is excruciating.

I reach for the laces once more, needing that sense of control over something, but careful hands still mine.

“Enough.” He gently unlaces the corset until my waist expands to its normal size, until my cracked ribs snap back into place. The physical pain subsides, but the aching remains. “I promise you we will partake in the Pledging, Rory, and when we do, we will be surrounded by those who love us most.” He lifts my chin with his thumb and forefinger, starry eyes catching the sunlight and turning the color of midnight. “Because that is what you deserve. A ceremony where those in attendance are cheering for you to live a long, long life beside me.”

I’m stunned by his declaration, his promise, unable to identify this delicate feeling fluttering throughout me. He doesn’t seem to mind my lack of reply as he presses his lips to mine and calls upon the myst to return us to Wynterhaven.

Chapter 29

QUILL

Nerissa shuffles around the kitchen as quiet as sea mist caressing the hull of a ship as she prepares breakfast for herself and Cora. Keeping vampiric hours is something she’s done since partaking in the Pledging with Godrick, and I can’t help but get lost in the familiar sounds of her morning routine.

Rory still sleeps like the dead in the ridiculously small bed we shared last night. I wasn’t able to glean more than a few hours of sleep before Nerissa creeped down the hall on wool-stockinged feet. I left Rory curled on her side in the bedroom, not because she needed the sleep, but because I’m too cowardly to face her. Especially after our disagreement at Garden’s Gate. I scrub a hand over my face. I’m a godsdamned fool for hurting her feelings. I hadn’t meant to, but the intention behind my words didn’t matter when the reality was she felt rejected by my not rushing the Pledging.

She already feared having regrets about becoming a vampire.

The Pledging ceremony is eternal. In life and in death, we will be inextricably bound.

Selfishly, I couldn’t bear to be an ever-lasting regret if she decides years from now that I am not who she wants. At least now if she changes her mind about me, she can learn to shut me out as her sire.

Of course, I didn’t say all this to her last night because, again, I’m a godsdamned fool, and my mind had been spinning with the overwhelming need to give her whatever her heart desired. My restraint wavered as her eyes glistened with hurt, and the urge to whisk her into my arms and carry her to Godrick’s chapel where we’d partake in the Pledging and make love over and over again on the altar had nearly consumed me.

Just like her pain nearly consumed her.

The tightening of a ribbon. Sharp snaps of bone.

I flinch, grateful Nerissa’s questioning gaze is focused on the stovetop and not on me.

Rory tightened that dreadful corset until her waist was a caricature of itself, until I could fit my hands around her and touch my fingertips on the opposite hand. I waited as patiently as I could for her to stop torturing herself until I could bear it no more. Until the overwhelming fear she’d snap in half right before my eyes had me reaching for her, halting her, releasing her.

I’d seen in her memories how she’d find ways to wrest control in her life—skipping meals, then over-indulging, tightening her corset until it left bruises on her pale skin, holding her breath under the bath water until her lungs burned and begged for air.

She punished herself because she couldn’t punish the ones who deserved it. She⁠—