Page 123 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

And it always made me reckless. As it does now.

“I never intended to lock you in,” he says eventually, into the laden silence. It sounds like another confession. “When you ran out today, Melody, you could have died. Youwouldhave died had I not found you in time.”

His voice is so grave I look up again, startled by the sudden sapphire blue in his eyes, locked on me.

“Shame. You’d have lost your precious silver elf.”

He looks like he wants to say something else but catches himself. “Do youwantto die?” he asks instead, watching me very closely.

I wonder whether, if I said yes now, he would just end me. Drink me, all of me. Maybe I want him to.

I look away as he stands, towering over me. I think about his teeth on my skin.

“Answer me,” he demands, a wave of his magic swamping me when I ignore him. When I keep my head turned away.

I hold on to myself a little tighter. “Sometimes I’m so tired. I’m just so… broken. I lived so long expecting to die every day that I no longer know how to imagine anything else. Anything a week ahead, or even a month. I wonder whether that will ever change?”

I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know whether he, as a real immortal, can do anything but laugh about me. But it’s true. I feel stuck in this state, my whole body permanently expecting a threat. Danger.

“I didn’t want to hurt you, the other night in your room,” he says after a long while. He’s been so silent I didn’t even hear him breathing.

“I just thought…” He takes a deep breath but doesn’t finish his sentence.

It makes me look at him, the fierceness in his gaze burning a hole in me. I want to know what he would have said though.

“Was that—an apology?” I ask, half-disbelieving, half-joking. But curious all the same.

He frowns as if this irritates him, and I wonder whether I pushed too far. Again. I doubt that a man like him, an angel, a king, has ever apologized for anything.

But then he asks, “Would it change anything if it was?” It’s the raw tone of his voice that makes me flinch.

“I suppose. It’s not like anyone’s ever apologized to me,” I say quietly, wondering what it means. “But I guess all I want are truths.”

A muscle ticks in his jaw while he doesn’t look at me, but at apoint behind me. I wish I could read his aura now. Get a sense of what he’s thinking. But it’s still veiled behind that grayish mist.

“If truth is what you want, you shall have it.”

He gets up and leaves without another word.

***

Later, when I slowly come out of the bathroom, I find Caryan with a glass of tawny liquid in one hand in his living room, right in front of the terrace. Now I understand the Fortress, the terraces, the way it was built. He could just walk out and plummet from the sky with his wings.

There’s no trace of them now. He’s changed into linen trousers and a linen shirt, the upper buttons opened to reveal more of his skin. I have the foolish thought that I’ve never seen him in ordinary clothes before.

A few candles burn in modern lanterns, the room soft with shadows. I shiver, but not from the cold. My hair is still damp, I’m wrapped in a towel since my clothes were gone when I got out of the bathtub. To find them gone filled me with something I don’t want to ponder too closely.

Caryan turns at the sound of my naked feet on the floor. I pause in the middle of the room, feeling small in its vastness. As if I’m drowning.

His eyes rove over me. His lips blackened by the liquid in his glass.

I try to find my voice but can’t. I just stand there, looking at him. A fawn before a lion.

I’m too tired to pretend. To bare, too naked after what I said to him in the bathroom. I wonder whether he, too, sheds his skin at the end of a day. Whether he wears the mask of the king, and if so, what he turns into when he takes it off? Who is he now?

His eyes darken, turning a glistening, tarry black, matching his lips as he saunters closer. Casually. So easily crossing the distance. So silently.

Darkness, treading light as a feather.

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