Page 174 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

“The door likes me,” I reply.

He raises his brows, watching me with predatory intent. “Does it now?”

“It will let me go.”

He smiles at that, but to himself this time. I’ve never seen him really smile, and it affects me. It’s a thing of savage, dark beauty. It makes his face so handsome I can barely stand the sight. But I can’t look away either, and I know that, for some reason, he’s in a strangely mild mood.

The smile fades when he says, “The whole Fortress is an extension of me.”

My heart jumps at the revelation. What does that mean? Thathelikes me? That the door really won’t let me out? That the door was only nice to me, only showed me the library becausehewanted to show me? And if so, why?

“Now be a good girl and bring me the towel,” he repeats somberly, power rippling unmistakably around the edges of the room and over me—a bittersweet resonance in my bones. His darkness, like a song something in my veins wants to answer.

With a last glance toward the door I obey, my bare feet stepping one step down into the water, then another one and another one, until water starts to claim my dress, steam clouds my face, and I’m in it up to my ribs.

Caryan pushes himself away from the edge then, drawing closerto me. I wait, mortified, my heart beating so violently I must be shaking from it alone.

I look down at the water, then at his wings slowly being pulled through it behind him with every step he takes with that unnerving grace. He stops in front of me, the darkness and the water hiding his lower body from me—that marvel of muscle and power.

A shiver of premonition goes through me when he takes the towel from my hand and carelessly throws it aside before he closes the last distance between us.

The world stops. Only to return faster and clearer than ever when his fingers trace an invisible line over my cheek, over the flowers that might be still there.

I shudder against the touch as his fingers move down to my neck where he bruised me before.

His voice is quiet when he says, “I didn’t mean to hold you that hard, Melody.”

Melody.My name is like a beautiful song from his mouth. A chant that runs along my skin.

“It doesn’t matter.”

I know it was the wrong thing to say when he grabs my chin and makes me meet his gaze. “Itdoesmatter. But sometimes I forget how delicate you are. How vulnerable. How breakable.”

I don’t know what to say, disarmed by the honesty in his eyes. Instead, I reach out and run my fingers over his wings. They are as incredibly soft under my skin, just as I dreamed them to be, those feathers like silk, so soft and fluffy I want to wrap myself in them.

His eyelids flutter when I stretch up and, ever so gently, run my fingers over them, tracing the mighty muscles of his wing arches under the feathers. He shivers under my touch. When I look at his face again, a golden fire burns in his eyes.

Raw and aching.

When I look around, I find the water has turned into a gleaming, silvery pool of liquid starlight. Black magic spreads in its middle, its inky vines brushing up against me. Above us, I find the same tiny little sparks of silver fire in the air, whirling like snowflakesaround curls of shadow light, playing around my cheeks and through my hair like the gentlest of breezes.

I glance back at Caryan’s face, only to find his irises again a molten silver, surrounded by darkness, like a star lost in the universe.

“This… you’re doing this,” I whisper, awestruck. Yet there is a hollow echo of disappointment in my bones I can’t deny. That I could even think something so beautiful could bemine. Could come fromme.

“No. This is all you,” he says back. When he notices my gaze, he adds, the same admiration I saw before in his face now lying in his voice, “You are the one allowing it to do this. I could not, even if I wanted to.”

He stretches his hands out at that, and the silver magic,mysilver magic, curls around his fingers like a snake, seemingly of its own will, gliding along his fingers and around his wrist, intertwining with his shadows, dancing over his mighty wings.

I put my hand against his, palm against palm, shuddering against the effect of being so close to him. Against that spark deep inside I feel every time he is near. The silvery lights burn even brighter as our bodies touch, as if my skin on his intensifies it.

I say, “But you… your magic triggers it.”

“It amplifies it,” he corrects darkly and, indeed, my light fades when I pull my hand back, when I’m no longer touching him.

“You will learn to call it on your own,” he says.

I glance down at myself, at the slightest shimmer of stardust still glistening over my skin. “Your magic, it’s… calling mine,” I say, wondering whether this can be true. But I can feel it. I feelhimeverywhere, more acutely than ever, as if a part of him is running along the inside of my veins, dark and velvety, singing and humming.

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