Текст книги "In the Veins of the Drowning"
Автор книги: Kalie Cassidy
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 22 страниц)
King Theodore took slow steps into the hall, and the crowd split like water around a stone to let him pass. His chamber was on the same level as my own, and if I knew Nemea at all, he’d put him in the worst accommodations the fort had to offer. A small, drafty chamber at the northeastern corner, with crumbling exterior stones that had been harassed by the winds since the day they’d been stacked.
Flanked by his guards, Theodore started up the stairs. His every movement was filled with muscled grace, and when he neared the top, our gazes crashed together. His eyes rounded, and I could only imagine how shocking I must have looked. Severe in my black wedding gown, dark hair windblown, blood smeared on my cheeks, smattering my chest like gruesome freckles. He still beheld me with disapproval nearing abhorrence, but his gaze dipped to my injured hand, which I held protectively against me, and his full lips flattened in what looked like concern.
He might help. He might say yes.
“May we speak?” I whispered, before he could stride away from me, down the northern wing.
He paused for what felt like a lifetime, but finally, reluctantly, he dipped his chin in the barest of nods, then continued toward his chamber. I didn’t miss the tension strung through his body, the lingering anger that trailed him like smoke. He was everything Nemea had always said he was—haughty and honorable and righteously indignant—but I did not wish to break him of those qualities, like Nemea did.
I wished to use them.
The crowd in the entryway below me began to disperse. Some made their way out into the courtyard; some huddled together toward the throne room. I made my way down the hall on what felt like new legs. Four Varian guards flanked the farthest door. Their golden armor glinted in a pool of light that slipped through the narrow window beside them. As I reached the end of the hall, one of the guards swung the door wide for me to enter.
“Thank you.” I took a tentative step inside.
A fire popped in the small hearth. The hinges whined as the door shut behind me. The chamber was only a bed, a wooden chair by the fire, and a single window that King Theodore peered out of with his back to me.
“There’s a cloth and water by the door,” he said, his voice a deep, warm resonance in his chest.
“I’m all right, Your Majesty, thank you.”
“Wash quickly. I’ll wait.”
I bit back my protest and wrung out the cloth. It came away from my cheeks with fat smears of pink. There was something in the action of it, in being commanded to clean up the blood he’d spilled on me, that made me feel almost as insignificant as I did with Nemea. The feeling hardened my jaw.
I finished cleaning and cleared my throat.
“Speak,” he said.
“Your Majesty, thank you for giving of your time—”
“No.” He locked his hands behind his back. “Speak about why you are here.”
I gulped down the ball of nerves that clogged my throat. “I—I came to ask for your help.”
He blew out a long breath. “Agatha sent you, didn’t she?”
“I beg your pardon?” I shook my head. “No. Agatha has no idea I’m here. Why would she send me?”
Finally, he turned. The firelight accentuated his strong nose, the sharp line of his jaw and cheekbone, and I could not help but stare. He was captivating, even more so with the way his fury still sparked in the air around him. “She came to me last night after the feast. She said it was imperative you leave the fort before your wedding.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Did she tell you… did she explain why?”
The kingdom of Varya was a peaceful one. Sirens lived among the ancestral Varians there, but still, the thought of anyone knowing my secret while I stood upon Serafi soil filled me with abject terror.
“She did. But the revelation that you’re a Siren was no shock. I told you I knew you.”
That insouciant surety of his gnawed at me. I longed to ask him more, to ask him how, but his gaze turned incisive. I stilled while he dissected the shape of my eyes, my nose, my mouth. His gaze lingered on my lips for a breath. Then another. As he stared, he slipped into some faraway place.
“Your Majesty,” I said softly, trying to bring him back. “What answer did you give Agatha?”
He blinked, then cleared his throat. “Despite my many concerns about your current arrangement, I told her no.”
“No.” An ugly emotion surged through me. “May I ask why?”
“For one, you didn’t seem like you wished to leave.”
“Forgive me, but how could you presume to know what I want?”
A deep furrow carved his brow. “Lady Imogen, I have eyes. And though I cannot fathom the pairing—a secret Siren and her hunter—you couldn’t keep your hands from your fiancé last night. The captain spent half the evening with his lips on your neck.”
I prayed it was too dark for him to see the rush of embarrassment that heated my cheeks. “The captain also spent half the morning telling me of his plans to force a blood bond between us.” He froze at that. “You saw how easily he sliced my hand in that ritual room. How thoughtlessly he hurt me.”
Anger seemed to reignite within him. The heat of it filled his eyes. “Agatha left me with the impression that your identity is unknown here—that you both take great pains to keep it that way. How does the captain know what you are?”
I pressed a hand to my chest where my heart thudded against my ribs. “He… did not know until last night.”
“Before the feast or after?”
“After.”
His patience snapped. “Tell me plainly how he knows.”
I hesitated, and he gave me a withering look. It surprised me, how desperately I wanted his poor view of me to change.
He strode toward me and stood so close that I had to look up to meet his eye. “Answer me or leave.”
“I shifted,” I said suddenly. “In front of him.”
Confusion narrowed his gaze. “How is that possible? A Siren’s power is tied to the sea. You shouldn’t be able to change this far away from it.”
“I…” My eyes dropped to his chest. “There was… sea salt… on his skin.”
He paused. “On his skin?”
“Yes. And I… well… I tasted it.”
“You tasted—” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Are you without both honor and self-control? Giving your blood freely, and now this—” He paced away from me, mumbling to himself in a pious fit. “What kind of coward stays in this place, scraping to Nemea’s whims? You’re an imbecile to marry a man whose job it is to kill you.”
Fury filled me, alarming and hot, and I heard Nemea’s scathing voice in my head. It is easy to be good when you’re blessed by the bloody fucking Gods. “How dare you!” I balled my hands to fists so I wouldn’t shove them against his chest. “I belong to Nemea. What should I have done? Should I have told him I prefer to not marry? Tell me how you would treat a subject who denied you, Your Majesty.” But he didn’t. He merely watched me in quiet, wide-eyed shock as I went on. “I have twisted and broken myself to survive here. You could never understand what that is like—”
“You should have tried to leave a long time ago.”
“Yes,” I snapped. “I should have. But I am trying now.” I held his gaze. “Will you help me?”
We stood in tense, heavy silence, breaths speeding and mingling. Then he gave a frustrated grunt. “Give me your hand.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Let me close that cut.”
I looked down at my gouged palm. I’d been so angry I’d forgotten about it, but he hadn’t. He had the Great God Panos’s power over life, the power to grow and mend. Slowly, eyes locked with his, I extended my wounded hand. “This is not the help I’m requesting of you.”
“I know.” His fingers were impossibly warm for the temperature in the drafty chamber. With a strong but gentle touch, he inspected the cut. “It’s deep.”
“Yes.”
“There’s too much scar tissue here.” The anger in his voice had dulled, and all that remained was tension. “I can’t prevent it from becoming another scar. I’m sorry.”
I’d never received such an earnest apology. I spoke carefully, trying to hide my surprise. “I am not imbecilic enough to think I’d be undamaged, Your Majesty. What’s another scar atop many?”
He gave me a quick, curious look before a heat built in his hands. A heat like the sun, coming from inside him. I held my breath and watched the red flesh around the gash start to soothe. “It would start a war,” he said, his focus on my wound. “If Nemea knows I helped you escape.”
Slowly, my skin began to knit together. I pulled in a shallow gasp as I watched it—a network of pale, fleshy lace, its stitches growing closer and closer together as the heat he poured into me spread.
“Forgive me,” I said, my voice breathy from his ministrations, “but you have not seemed all that intent on fostering peace between the two of you. Your every action, your every word, has been inflammatory. Why did you truly come here in the first place?”
His jaw tensed and he finished checking his work. The wound had become a thin white seam across the mound of old scars in my palm. His warm hands remained on mine. “As you guessed, I came to see the state of this place for myself. To see Seraf’s horrors. To see just how cruel Nemea had become.” The calluses on his fingers scratched as he finally, slowly, let me go. “I have a deep hatred for the man.”
“Then take me from him.”
His gaze shot to mine.
My words tumbled forth in one desperate breath. “Nothing would hurt him more than to lose what he considers his.”
“That’s my fear.” He shook his head, and he gave me that strange, lingering look once more. “I have a kingdom to protect. A war would put it in jeopardy.”
“You came to witness his cruelty firsthand and then do nothing about it? If there is any person in Leucosia who has the power to alter the awful things that happen here, it’s you.”
Theodore ran a hand through his dark hair. He seemed to grapple with something, shut his eyes for a long moment. When he looked at me again it was with something akin to anguish. Pity coated his unsettlingly soft words. “He’s done such a thorough job of diminishing you.”
That hollowed me out. I stood before him, feeling bare and ill and embarrassed, and fighting to keep it hidden.
He moved back to the small window. “I will send you help. I leave tomorrow—I have no desire to stay for your wedding. When I’m back home, I’ll make a plan to get you off Seraf. But it will take me time. It can’t look like I was involved.”
“I don’t have time.” I curled my healed hand, my nails cutting into my palm. “The wedding is tomorrow night. By the time you send me help, Captain Ianto will have already bound us. How will I leave him then?”
He straightened his bloodstained coat, and it was as if he’d donned a suit of armor. He looked at me down the line of his nose. “There are draughts to sever such bonds.” His features smoothed into kingly austerity. “The appropriate response to my generosity is ‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’”
I reeled back. “If you expect me to thank you for giving me the opportunity to suffer, then you are no better than King Nemea, Your Majesty.” His flinch filled me with satisfaction.
I wrenched the door open, letting it crash into the wall. “Move,” I yelled to one of the guards who blocked my path. Panic scurried up my throat, blocked my breath. Agatha’s chamber was on the lower floor. I could keep myself together until I reached her, but as I made my way down the hall from King Theodore’s chamber, I faltered.
Two of Nemea’s guards, clad in their ominous black armor, stood before my chamber door. They wore helmets that only showed their lower faces. One guard, whose jaw was covered in red spots and pock scars, shoved the other with a gangly elbow when he saw me. “She’s there.”
The older guard offered me a quick half bow. “Into your chamber, my lady.”
“You have no right ordering me around.” I spoke with authority, even as my heart plummeted. “I’m the king’s ward.”
“You’re the captain’s lady now,” the pock-faced boy-soldier mumbled. “And he’ll make my life hell if you’re not in that room when he’s back.”
“I’ll not be a prisoner in my own home.” I trudged onward, but he reached out a single wiry arm and scooped me up. I yelled as he hefted me toward my open door. I thrashed and clawed before I was unceremoniously dropped to my rug and shut in. “I’ll have the king skin you for this.” The door rattled in its frame as I beat against it.
“Forgive me, my lady.” The guard sounded unrepentant through the heavy oak. “Captain’s orders.”
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The entire afternoon passed with guards barring my door. No one entered. Not Agatha, nor Evander.
I scrubbed my face with frigid water. Washed my hair and slipped on a clean chemise and dressing gown. All the while I thought on how I might escape. Perhaps there were passages I’d failed to discover when I’d been a curious girl exploring the fort. Dark and winding tunnels I’d missed that might lead me to the base of the mountain. But unsurprisingly, I found no secret doors behind the tapestries in my room. There were no cobwebbed halls behind my hanging gowns.
As the sun began to set, I sprawled over my mattress, staring up at the ceiling while a horrific maw widened in my stomach. My hope slowly slipped inside it, swallowed up.
Three quick knocks came. I sat bolt upright. The pock-faced soldier swung my door open, and Agatha walked in. Her hair was loose and wild, black curls haloing her wan face. She held a single lit candle. “I’m allowed to stay until it burns out.”
My throat shut at the sight of her, so I nodded and patted the mattress beside me. Her gown was creased, and her knit wrap was pulled tightly around her narrow shoulders. She walked silently, grabbed a book from my table, and set it at the foot of my bed. She placed the candle atop it, then drew all the bedcurtains shut. She climbed onto the bed and propped herself up beside me. We both waited until the door snicked closed to talk.
“King Theodore came to speak with me,” Agatha whispered.
Angry tears sprang to my eyes. “Did he tell you I was an imbecile? That I was a coward and that all of this is my fault—”
“Shhh.” Agatha moved closer, wove her fingers through mine. “No. He came to tell me of your conversation. And that he would work on a plan to get you out.”
I shook my head. “He said it would take him time. Time I don’t have.”
“He’ll get you out,” Agatha said, with assuredness. “I trust him.”
“Tell me why.” I peered up at her from where I lay. The firelight flickered around our little cocoon. “You only knew him as a boy. He’s certainly changed since you were his governess. He’s a dashing, priggish king now.” Agatha squeezed my hand and I fell silent, and then, quietly, I asked, “How did you come to leave him and end up here?”
Agatha hesitated. “When I knew the king—the prince, then—he was about seven. I was only sixteen, and I fell in love with a young soldier in the king’s guard.” She swallowed hard. “After some time, we decided to perform a blood bond. In secret. Just the two of us one night in front of the fire.” Melancholy filled her voice as she recalled it, and I wondered if she saw the flame-lit memory in her mind. “But when King Athan, Theodore’s father, found out—well, he ordered that our bond be severed.”
I turned to see her better. “Severed? But you loved each other.”
“If only love were enough to overthrow the will of a king.” She huffed a breath. “Afterward, I left and came to Seraf. Word hadn’t spread yet that Nemea had started hunting Sirens when I set sail.”
“I see.” I propped my head on my hand. “Do you still love him? Your soldier.”
“That was nearly twenty years ago, Imogen.”
“Do you?” She shook her head too quickly and wouldn’t meet my eye, which pulled a smile from me. “Well, when my future husband has tied me to some bed, or some mast, and I am no longer allowed to keep a handmaid, I hope you leave this place and go find him.”
“Imogen.” She scowled at me. “I know Theodore. He will help.”
“Was he imperious as a boy too, or is that quality something he needed time to grow into?”
Agatha snorted. “He was a sweet boy.” She gave me a sidelong look. “I remember him constantly whining for sugar cubes, though.”
I grimaced. “Disgusting.”
“Imogen.” Agatha’s voice went low and somber. “The news I hear from Varya is filled with stories of what a generous ruler he is. He is duty-bound to his core.”
I quirked a brow. Fort Linum was a distance from Port Helris and the connected town of Stowand. Whatever information Agatha received about Varya and its king came from far outside the fort. Correspondence from the rest of the archipelago came sporadically, unreliably. “Who told you that?”
Agatha’s pert nose scrunched up and a blush stained her cheeks. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s just a curious and very specific detail, ‘duty-bound to his core,’” I said. “How do you know it?”
She swatted the question away with her hand. “Friends send me letters.”
“About the king of Varya?” The blush on her cheeks darkened. I sat all the way up. “It’s your soldier, isn’t it? He still writes you?”
Agatha shuddered. She took both my hands into hers. “He’s here. He’s Theodore’s commander now.”
“He’s here? Have you seen him?”
Agatha nodded, a soft but warring look on her face. “I asked if he could possibly help too, but… Not right now. It’s too dangerous. Please, please trust that King Theodore will do what he’s promised in his own time.”
“I’ll be bound to Evander by then.” My voice shook. The hope of escape was slipping through my fingers like water. “It’ll be too late to leave. What if I’m with child by the time he enacts his ‘plan’? What if I’m nothing but a corpse?”
“Stop.” Agatha’s big eyes filled with a silvered rim of tears. “You serve no purpose to the captain dead. And you will not be with child—I’ll make sure of it. A few months, Imogen. We can make it through together for a few months, can’t we?”
My eyes fluttered shut. “You think I’m much stronger than I am.” I could only bend for so long before I snapped.
Agatha threw her arms around me and tucked us back into the pillows. I let myself weep then. The profound, mourning kind of weeping. I could only suck in hiccuping breaths by the time she spoke again.
“Someday,” she whispered, as her fingers played through my damp hair, “you will have a full life. A home, if you want one. And you’ll see more than these stones and mountains and sky. And I’ll be with you when you first touch the sea. You’ll feel sand between your toes, and salt water on your tongue, and you will feel more joy than you can fathom. I promise.”
We sat like that, watching the candle flicker across the bedcurtains until it burned itself out. Agatha kissed my forehead before she left. The darkness was thick as pitch, so I closed my swollen eyes, and I sank into the mattress where I floated between wakefulness and sleep—in a liminal space where the sheets around me became seafoam, and the tears in my mouth the waves.
Hours passed slowly, dragging me into the middle of the quiet night. The mumbling and shuffling sounds of the guards in the hall had finally ceased. I wondered if they’d left, or perhaps they’d fallen off to sleep. I pulled back the bedcurtain, swung my feet to the floor, and crept on tiptoe to listen at the door.
There was only the blood whooshing through my ears, but I stood like that for a long while, listening for breathing, for any sound at all. Finally, I set my hand to the knob—
And froze.
There were boots on the stairs. Heavy footsteps, far below, but they were drawing closer. Then there were many boots, ascending in unison—like soldiers did. I drew away and threw myself back onto the bed just as my door squealed open.
“Love, wake up.” Evander spoke softly. He held a candle above me. “Come with me.”
His gray shirt was creased and untucked. His cheek was stubbled with blond hair and his brow was damp with sweat. The contours of his face looked strange in the light, casting undulating shadows over the curves of his skull beneath his skin. I opened my mouth to ask what he was doing when he held a single finger up to his lips, silencing me. He took my hand and tugged me to stand.
“Take this off,” he whispered, as he pulled at the ties of my dressing gown.
“No.” I crossed my arms tightly over my chest. “What do you want—” Light glinted off a slim, curved pipe tucked beneath his arm. “What is that?”
Before he answered, a tendril of briny air wound itself into my nose and I knew precisely what he carried—the siphon. The one they used to force a Siren to shift before executing her. The scuff and fall of his soldiers’ footsteps filled the hall. Like ants at work, they filed into my chamber, each carrying two buckets of water.
Seawater.
The sea and I had never met—not truly—but I knew it. It was in my blood and bones. I was made from it and would return to it.
Evander’s men went into my dressing room. The splash, splash, splash of their buckets emptying into my tub sent a prickle across my skin. They kept coming, a dozen of them at least, and I watched, stunned still.
Evander set down the candle and worked on the ties at my waist, taking the dressing gown from my shoulders so I wore only my thin chemise. He took the siphon into his hand. Determination stained his countenance—fists rounded and jaw set. He moved toward my dressing room door. “Come.”
“I do not want to.”
Evander stopped midstride, his eyes filled with menace. His men were just winding their way back out to the hall. “You’re relieved,” he said to them, quietly. “Go.” They obeyed. The door closed noiselessly, and Evander slid the bolt.
He grimaced at me. “Don’t look at me like that.” The siphon dropped to the woolen rug with a dull ping. “Don’t you, of all things, dare look at me like I disgust you.”
Something snapped inside me, my anger dislodging from where I’d tried to stuff it. “It’s I that disgusts you. I see it in the way you look at me, I feel it in the way you touch me.” The salty air was slinking through the room now, curling between us. I pulled in a deep, shaking gulp of it, and something in my chest vibrated. A string, plucked. “You can’t possibly love me. You are so willing to hurt me—”
“Our binding will fix that,” he spewed.
“It won’t. It will only compel you to protect me.” My words were tight and quick. “It will not change me or your resentment. I will still be what I am, and you’ll only know misery because in your heart… In your heart you wish to kill me.”
His amber eyes pulled wide, brows sinking. Tense and silent, he bent to retrieve the siphon and came at me with stalking steps. He stopped when our chests touched. “If I’d wanted you dead, my love, you would be.” A sickening shiver fell down my spine as he raised a hand into my hair and gripped it in his fist. “I’ve loved you for so long. Did you know? Long before I begged the king for your hand. Long before I touched you.” He shook his head. “You gave me a shock, yes, but in her own strange way, Eusia has answered my prayer by giving me you. Your blood in my veins will make me untouchable. No Siren lure will be a threat. My men will look at me like I’m a god.” He pressed his lips to my temple, spoke against my skin. “I could never resent you for that, Imogen.”
The way my guts heaved made me feel like I was falling. Down and down, and my entire being knew that impact was imminent. Touching him felt vile, but I threw my arms around his neck, hoping it would stop my plummeting. “Please.” My mouth was at his ear. “Please don’t.”
A hot exhale against my cheek was his only reply. It wasn’t an apology. Not remorse, nor regret. It was a breath of disappointment, for I could not see and understand what he could—that this was best for both of us. He bent, breaking my hold, and hooked an arm below my hips. I wasn’t petite like Agatha. I was tall, with well-formed muscles. My waist nipped in between full curves, but Evander could lift me as easily as one might a child. He folded me over his shoulder and held me tightly as he carried me over the threshold of my dressing room.
“No.” I beat my fists into his solid back. “Put me down.”
The air within was thick and briny. I sucked it in as Evander dropped me to my feet. The seawater in the tub beside me glimmered in the faint light of an oil lamp one of the soldiers had left behind. Had I been alone, I would have climbed in myself, eager for the water to make me feel fearsome instead of fragile.
“I deserve this, Imogen.” His fingers bit into my arms as he spun me. He grabbed my chemise and ripped the back open, straight down to my waist, making space for my wings. Panic clogged my mind. It froze my limbs. His body was hot against my back as he spoke over my bare shoulder. “I’ll be the captain the Sirens could not drown, and you will live well and safe up here where your instincts can’t taint you.”
It was instinct that slashed through me then. It sent my arm rearing back, it crooked my fingers into a claw and sent my body whirling. My nails scraped over his forehead in an arch, then hooked into the lower lid of his eye. Welted lines of ripped skin rose on his sun-kissed face. A drop of blood slipped from his lashes like a crimson tear.
He growled through clamped teeth, but he didn’t strike me. Instead, his bulky arms clamped around mine, pinning them to my side. “It’ll be over soon.” Then my feet were off the ground. He tipped me backward, over the lip of the wooden tub. I gasped as he dumped me into the water. Not from the cold, or the way my spine struck the wooden base, but at how it set me alight.
My panic dissipated. It was as if a million tiny teeth cut through me, into my sinew and bone. Into my very marrow.
Taking the water where it belonged.
Everything around me faded, even as Evander set the curved pipe into the tub near my feet and put his lips around the exposed end. He sucked until the sea began to pour through it, then spat. His strong fingers dug into the back of my neck, folding me toward the siphon’s end. Its metal was sharp against my lips. Liquid spilled over my chin.
His fingers dug into my face. “Open your mouth.”
Despite everything, I wanted to taste it. To be flooded with it. I unhinged my clamped jaw. The pipe nicked my bottom teeth, the sound echoing through my skull. Salt water poured over my tongue, down my throat, filling my lungs. They grew heavy, my chest widening. I did not blink. I did not move. I only stared up at him.
Horror contorted Evander’s face. “Imogen?” His eyes darted over me, watching as the water that would not fit inside me trickled back out of my mouth, down my chest.
Drowning should burn, and I waited for it, only to remember that I could not drown. All I could feel was that odd plucking sensation between my ribs. An angry heat sparking to life in the very center of me. It grew and grew and grew until whatever was tied through me did not merely vibrate like a string—it pulsed like a vein. Like an artery, and it poured sludgy, oil-like power, black and sick, right into my gut.
It rolled through my body like magma and when the heat hit my back, my wings ripped through my skin and unfurled. My nails stretched into black-tipped talons.
Through the hum of coursing power came a voice so soft, I thought I imagined it. The water’s words were frail and distant, like a breeze whispering round the shell of my ear, fighting to be heard.
There you are, dearest. I’ve waited so long.
I jolted. My gaze shot to Evander’s. He knelt beside the tub, watching me with relief in his tear-rimmed eyes. He removed the siphon from between my lips, and in his other hand he gripped the curved dagger that had hung at his hip. He would slice me open, just as deep as last time, and shackle me to him.
No, no, no.
That pulse in my gut turned white hot at the thought of it. Then Evander went suddenly still, eyes drooping and muscles loose. The dagger he held slipped from his hand. It clattered against the edge of the tub as it fell to the floor. I retched up the water from deep inside my chest, and as if commanded, Evander stood, lifted a leg, and stepped into the tub.
Blood screamed through my ears; the dark pulse in my belly thumped. My essence slipped outside my flesh and bone and watched as Evander sank down into the water. He was large for the narrow tub, but he managed to bring his body over the top of my own, and wrapped his arm around my winged back. Reverently, he placed a kiss below my eye.
In a shadowy corner of my mind, I thought it curious that he would come in with me. That he’d dropped his dagger. His whole body was rigid as a new corpse above me, but his breaths kept coming. They fluttered across my mouth, like warm waves, rolling in, then sucked back out.
A Siren’s domain was the wind and sea, and even his breaths felt like my own.
So I took them.
Through the part in my lips, I drew out his air until there was none left in his chest. His face reddened as he dipped his head just below the waterline to rest it on my breasts. The desire to drown him gripped me. I wanted his chest filled just as mine had been, and when I wished it, he pulled in a sea-choked breath. His nose and mouth flooded. I knew the paths the water took, sensed it as it pooled inside him.
His heavy body twitched against mine.
As the beats of his heart slowed, so too did the pulsing current inside me. It ebbed, stopped. It left me feeling full, but not satiated. Now that I had tasted such control, such power, I understood why Evander had been so hungry for it. My mind returned to me fully once he was waterlogged and limp.
My dressing room was silent, the lantern light steady. I pushed against Evander’s heavy shoulder. “No.” Panic sliced at me. “Gods, no.”
For a moment, I wished I could drown. I’d let his weight pin me under, and I’d drink deeply, and before the light in my eyes went black, I would see, as if they were real, all the things I’d always yearned for.
Evander’s body grew somehow weightier, bending my ribs and pulling me from the daydream of my idyllic death.
The one that awaited me would be so much worse.
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