Page 57 of Enslaved

My breath hitches. The muscles in my shoulders tense.

“You’re wrong,” he repeats, in a voice as deep and dark as the night. “To really love someone is to be willing to give them up. To know they are free to make their own choices, for better or for worse. To allow them that freedom. To let go . . . even if it means watching them fall.”

I grind my teeth, tucking my chin in even tighter, allowing my hair to fall along the side of my face. “That doesn’t sound very loving to me.”

“Then perhaps you are the one who doesn’t understand love.”

I turn my head slowly, letting my hair part so that I can peer at him sidelong. “And you?” I ask softly. “Is this how you love, Prince? Will you always let go?”

His eyes burn into mine, twin violet flames. They drop to focus on my lips before traveling with slow reluctance back up again. There’s pain in his gaze, and when he draws breath, it shudders through his lips. “I don’t know if I can.” His voice is a low growl, rumbling in my gut. “Not when every selfish urge tells me to hold on fast.”

I tip my head. “You admit you are selfish then.”

His hands, resting on his knees, clench into fists, knuckles white. “I am.” He turns and stares out across the endless expanse of blighted desert. “I am the most selfish man I know.”

I look at him. Study him. Take in every detail of his features, so beautiful even when knotted with tension. His words reverberate through my soul like the pulse of my own heart.

Suddenly, I cannot resist. Not one moment more. I lean forward, catch him by the face, and press my lips against his cheek. For a moment, I simply rest there. Holding him. Feeling his skin so hot against mine. It isn’t much. Such a small point of contact. But after dancing on the edge of the vast gulf between us for so long . . . it feels likeeverything.

He sits frozen in that simple embrace. Then he lets out a ragged breath, pulls away, turns to me, catches my shoulders. My head whirls, and my body flares with heat that has nothing to do with the desert surrounding us. I can see nothing but him, feel nothing but his fingers digging into my flesh. In his eyes I see my own desperation reflected back. My own longing and need. I can hardly tell where I end and he begins.

The whole of my existence centers on this one fixed point in time. This one moment, this one chance.

Then he shakes his head. The pain, the longing, everything I thought I was reading in his face vanishes. “Don’t go all soft and soppy on me, Darling,” he says, smiling one of his awful, beautiful, heartbreaking, devastating smiles. “You’re the one with the mighty quest to complete, remember?”

With that he rises. As he does so, that gulf rips open between us once more. It’s an almost physical pain, like having my chest cleaved in two. I can only stare stupidly at the hand he extends to me.

“Come,” he says, his voice distant through the drumming in my ears. “It’s time we left this gods-blighted desert behind us. I’m sure you have a scheme in mind for curse-breaking. You can tell me all about it on the flight back to the gate.”

I try to breathe. My lungs tighten around a sob I cannot,will notutter. With excruciating pain, I pull air into my chest cavity, hold it. Let it out in a faint shudder.

Then I place my hand in his. By the time he’s pulled me to my feet, my face is a mask. Calm, collected, faintly smiling. Revealing nothing of the turmoil inside.

She struggles to bring back the stars.

I watch her in silence as she stands with her back to me, murmuring out the words she read before with such passion. All that power, all that magic which had risen up from the depths of her being and poured out from her lips in such a spectacular display seems to have shriveled up. The most she can conjure is a faint, watery impression which fades moments after appearing.

“I’m sorry,” she says at last, slamming the book shut and turning to me. Her face is as serene as ever, an unreadable mask save for a telltale shimmer in her eyes. Even that vanishes when she blinks, leaving me to wonder if I imagined it. “I . . . I think I’m too tired at the moment for magic.”

“Never mind, Darling,” I reply and pat the wyvern’s arched neck. “This fellow knows the way well enough. Having flown it once, he won’t forget anytime soon.” It’s true, for the wyvern has learned over the centuries of its existence to find its way unerringly to and from the floating isle. Its instincts are well honed, and will be able to discern meaning from the terrain which to our eyes remains as featureless as the open sea.

She nods and tucks the book of songs back into her satchel, lashes lowered, gently fanning her cheeks. She does not look up, not even when I reach out, place my hands around her waist, prepared to assist her up onto the wyvern’s back.

I freeze. Just for a moment, a mere instant of breath. But in that fraction of time and space, a whole lifetime’s worth of longing threatens to overwhelm me. I want to kiss her. I burn to feel her lips on mine. To draw her to me, press her to my breast, to take everything I’ve been hungering for all these long, sorry months, all these damnable years, since the first moment I set eyes on her terrified face.

But I can’t. I won’t.

Her gesture—impulsive and sweet as it was—doesn’t mean she feels what I feel. For me, the searing heat of her lips against my cheek was like the sudden explosion of the worlds into being. For her? It was what it was. A kiss. A token of gratitude. Possibly even some affection or regard.

But if I dare take it to mean more than it was, if I dare wrest from her more than she intended to give . . . Gods! I couldn’t live with myself.

So I lift her onto the wyvern’s back and swing up easily behind her. But here is more excruciating torture, this feeling of her body nestled between my legs. And when I snake an arm around her abdomen to steady her, when I draw her back against my chest, bracing her as the wyvern spreads its wings and takes flight . . . ah! It is bliss. Or as close to bliss as a worthless blackguard such as I could ever aspire to.

Surely this quest of hers must end soon. She may not yet be ready to acknowledge it, but there is no continuing from here. The dragon’s bargain is impossible, her hope of fulfilling it utterly forlorn. No, it must end. Then we will return to Vespre. All will go back to the way it should be. And not a moment too soon; the last few days of proximity have proven a terrible test on my resolve, my patience, my self-control.

Once we’re home, that tension must ease. She will ignore me with that same frosty frigidity I’ve come to know and loathe so well. Or she will train that agonizingly meaningless smile of hers my way. Never once knowing how I live for it. How my very existence depends on each look, each glance she offers. How I crave such graces as I crave food, light, air, and water.

The wyvern circles higher and higher above the forlorn towers of Volodaris. The air is thinner, and the little figure in my arms begins to shiver, her teeth to chatter. I wish now I’d not made her leave her cloak behind. Pulling her a little closer, I draw upon my magic, wrapping it around her like a blanket. But she tenses so hard, I give up and loosen my hold once more.

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