Page 80 of Malevolent King

23

SOFIA

Once my tears ran out, I sat on the freezing ground and cataloged the hurts I’d taken slowly and methodically. My fear and shock were fading, and cold, hard anger was replacing them.

Franco and his son needed to die. How dare they go against my father’s wishes like this? The rage warmed me. I couldn’t think too closely about how hurt Niko was. The memory of him ripping the pipe off the wall, and the blood coating his arms, his shoulder hanging oddly, was too much to endure. That he could be comforting me when I only had bruises and a tender spot on my head made me feel things I couldn’t deny.

Nope. I was truly done resisting what my heart had known for five years. I cared about him. He might be crazy, and I might be disowned, but none of that mattered anymore. Nothing mattered except surviving another day to get out of here alive.

As I thought of him, I realized he’d been quiet for a long time.

“Nikolai?” I called through the grate. He’d been right here, comforting me the entire time, though he had to be hurt beyond my imagining. The man’s tolerance for pain was not of this world.

“Hmm?” His voice sounded dreamlike and far off.

Wasn’t it bad to fall asleep when you were losing blood and so injured? What if he didn’t wake up? A new anxious sob worked up my throat.

“Will you tell me a story? You offered to once when we were running,” I heard myself ask into the darkness. My hands were bound in front of me with the same zip ties as they’d use on Niko. They hurt if I so much as flexed my wrists wrongly. I couldn’t imagine how deep the cut was from pulling the pipe off the wall.

“A story?” Niko mused.

“It’s dark in here and cold. I’m so tired, but I’ll never be able to sleep,” I muttered, feeling wretched. “I’m so scared.” The confession slipped from me, whispered guiltily into the darkness.

What right did I have to be scared compared to Nikolai? There was a hell of a high chance Silvio would demand Nikolai’s head when he woke up, and it didn’t look like Franco planned on stopping him. Add in the fact that my father’s health was declining, and the future was looking especially dark for the man in the cell next door. It might be hard for me, too, but somehow, the thought of Niko dying was the one that was torturing me.

“Okay, prom queen. I’ll tell you a bedtime story,” he said quietly, his voice comfortingly familiar.“Once upon a time, because that’s how all the good stories begin, there was a boy. He was a child of the woods, and the trees were his only friend. At night, he lay in the loam and counted the stars.”

His addictive murmurs swept a veil of ease over me. I thought of my younger self lying in my bed upstairs with the curtains drawn, staring at the stars stuck on the inside. Maybe I had always been meant to meet this man, since we were two lonely souls with nothing but the stars for company.

“He was a wild thing, and sometimes, he seriously considered walking farther into the woods and never returning to the world of men. In the end, he couldn’t, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because the boy wasn’t as whole as the animals he played with in the forest. He had a cage around his heart… one without a key. He could smile, and laugh, and pretend to be a real boy, but deep inside, he wasn’t.”

A chill crept through me at the painful melancholy of Nikolai’s words.

“There was a hole inside him, inside that locked-up place, where he couldn’t reach it.”

My eyes closed, and I hugged my knees hard. “You shouldn’t tell sad tales as bedtime stories.”

“Ah, but this story isn’t sad. One day, when the boy became a man, and his heart was blacker than the purest tar, he met a girl. One who once stared at the stars at night and dreamed of being loved, too. It didn’t matter how terribly he had lived his pathetic life. When she smiled at him, it felt like the fucking sun had finally risen for the first time in his life. He could feel the light on his face when she looked at him.”

I smiled. His words were so sweet and surprising. There were layers upon layers to this complicated man who’d stolen my heart, despite my best efforts to guard it. I wanted to spend my life discovering them, but there was a very real chance I’d never get to.

Weariness weighed me down. I was so tired; I let my eyes close, so I could imagine I was far away from this horrible, cold room filled with memories of other people’s pain.

Nikolai’s voice continued at a steady drone, but his words slipped from my understanding as I fell into a fitful sleep.

* * *

A bangagainst the wall behind me sent me flying from restless dreams. I tried to stand, and my tied hands immediately threw me off balance. I tipped to the side, banging my shoulder hard against the floor. My mouth felt stuffy, and it was freezing in the room. I hardly had any clothes on, so my teeth chattered immediately. My brain struggled to remember why I was tied up in the cold.

Nikolai.

The thought of him immediately pushed into my mind as I connected where the noise had come from.

“Nikolai?” I called frantically, pressing my face near the grate.

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