Page 40 of When Wishes Bleed

“I wish I could see the world as you do,” he said softly, watching me.

I blinked out of the daze I’d been in. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

A brown and tan moth fluttered over the grass. I called her to me and she landed on my finger. “See?” Tauren said. “Whomever you choose when you arrive back home should cherish the year he’ll have with you, for it will be the most memorable and magical time of his life.”

I raised my finger and let the moth take flight again. “This is common for a witch.” I shrugged. “It would seem boring for my hand-fasted.”

“Nothing about you is mundane or common, Sable.”

I swallowed, looking back to the sky to center myself. For a moment, it felt like I levitated. I may have.

“Do you want to know my first reason for extending you an invitation?” His hand crept across the cement bench and the tip of his pinky grazed my skin.

“Yes,” I cautiously agreed.

“Because I’ve never met anyone I felt connected to so immediately, so… completely. I wanted you to accept, because I wanted you to consider me. Consider having me, that is. As your husband.” His dark lashes fluttered the more flustered he became, and the sight made something in my chest ache.

As your husband. The words reverberated through my heart like the beat of a heavy drum.

“I can’t,” I told him regretfully.

He hung his head. “I know that now. You told me the night of the Equinox, but I thought there might be a chance that… never mind.”

The two of us were on opposite sides of a very dangerous line, but when he said such things to me, it made me want to tread closer to him. But like Thirteen’s boundary, this was a line we could never cross. There wasn’t enough magic in the world to pierce it.

12

Ileft him in the garden and somehow backtracked to my room without becoming lost. I scrubbed my face in the pristine bathroom sink and stared into the mirror, repeatedly asking myself, and Fate, what I was doing there. Why wasn’t he moving this along so I could return home?

Fate remained still, which was alarming since I could always feel him. Since I’d been chosen, he’d always hidden himself inside me. So, I wasn’t sure why he wouldn’t answer now. A simple, Because it’s not time would have sufficed. At least it would leave me the satisfaction of knowing that the time to act was approaching.

Pushing away from the sink, I peeled the t-shirt and skin-tight jeans from me like a snake shedding skin, and slipped on a short, black silk nightgown Mira had laid out on the bed for me.

I slipped inside the plush, black sheets and pulled the soft blankets over me like a caress. For a moment, I even managed to close my eyes… only for them to pop open again to admire the room he’d appointed for me.

I chastised myself for going to the garden in the first place. I’d thought he was in danger, or maybe that he wanted to know what his father talked to me about. It never crossed my mind that he would say such things, and yet they were true. I felt an intense connection to him as well, before I even knew he was the Prince.

But a relationship between us, let alone marriage, was out of the question. I had to get to the bottom of this issue, find the would-be killer, and leave before my heart was shattered. The King was worried for his son, but no one would worry about me.

Restless, I flipped and flopped, tangling in the nightgown a few times before I finally drifted off to sleep.

I dreamed I was back in my House, staring at the mirror, dressed and ready to get in the carriage again. But this time, my reflection did move. It reached out to me and said… “The one who lies.”

The one who lies? I panted as I woke, clutching my side. It was still dark. I panted through the pain. Fate whispered to me, Go to him.

I threw the covers back and ran out into the hallway. “Take me to him,” I pleaded. My breath turned to mist and flowed in a dark ribbon that I followed down the corridor as I limped up another flight of stairs and took the hallway that bent to the right. At the end of the hallway was a door. His room – if this was it – was directly over the one in which I was staying.

The smoky ribbon drifted to the floor and slipped beneath the door.

I knocked, my hands still shaking with fear. The pain in my side sharpened. I gasped, holding tight just below the ribs on my right side. “Please be okay,” I panted.

Tauren pulled the door open, blinking to clear his eyes. “Sable?”

I shoved my way around him, a cold sweat breaking out over my forehead. “Call for guards!” I shouted.

“Why? What’s happening?”

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