Page 81 of The Devil In Blue
Since the day we met, I hadn’t heard him sound so broken. His voice was so tense and strained and as he spoke, his grip tightening like he was afraid I’d slip away. I wrapped my arms around him, unable to get close enough, and closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t remember who he was before or who I was. And if I was a different person now, then what did I have to forgive him for? We’d only just met.
For hours, I sat against Rune’s body, wrapped in his arms and his heat. His protection. His breathing had slowed and so had mine. I could have fallen back to sleep in that position, letting his pulse and the hum of breath in his lungs lull me back into my cruel dreams. Instead, I found myself wondering something. Something I had a feeling Rune would know the answer to. I stared at the windows out to the balcony where the cerulean light outside bled into the library. I wasn’t even sure that he was still awake, but then his thumb moved back and forth a few times over my arm as if to assure me he was still there. I blinked slowly, taking a deep breath to still myself.
“What was on my back?” I whispered. “The scars. I know you’ve seen them. What did they cut away? What did they take?”
His thumb stopped stroking.
Perhaps I didn’t want to know.
“They clipped your wings, little bird,” he said, pain turning his deep, velvet voice to something tired and wrecked.
“I had wings…” I said, feeling a familiar numbness clawing its way through my consciousness. One that often showed up when I was too much of a coward to face something. I hated it, though. I was tired of not feeling.
“I gave them to you,” Rune whispered. “So you could fly. So you could feel as free as you were meant to be.”
I blinked slowly, a single tear dragging down my already stinging, raw cheek.
“They took my wings,” I said, my voice barely audible.
I knew they hadn’t only taken my wings, but it felt like it was everything. My freedom. My choices. My spirit.
Rune renewed his embrace and coiled his arms around me tighter, his lips pressing to my hair.
“I will give you new ones.”
I didn’t expect Rune to be so gentle and affectionate. Or maybe I did. After confirming he was the very same man behind the mask, I suppose it was natural to associate him with Petris’s traits. Petris was tender. Caring. Understanding. Rune had been forceful. Angry. Wound up.
As I walked behind him through the palace halls, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About his mask. About the way he carried himself differently. Even though I knew, it was strange to wrap my head around the idea that he’d been playing two roles since I arrived in the Glyn.
When we came to the foyer at the bottom of the steps, I paused a moment, taking in the thick vines along the walls like I did on my first night there. The flowers really were a sight, the fuschia and white were rich against the glass and black marble.
“Sweetbriar,” Rune said, drawing my eyes to him. He reached out and plucked one of the flowers off the vine and slowly walked it over to me. “Do you like them?”
I nodded, watching him lift the flower to my hair and stick it in the binds of my loose braid.
“They were your favorite,” he said, drawing my mood down a notch.
I dropped my eyes, feeling the pang of those lost memories in the dark void where they had once been. Rune nudged the knuckle of his finger under my chin and lifted my face to look at him again.
“I do wonder what your favorite might be now,” he said as if catching on to my discomfort.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I reached up and pulled the flower from my braid, twirling it between my fingers to get a good look at it. “These are beautiful, though. I can see why I—sheliked them.”
Referring to the woman he knew as “she” seemed to strike a nerve in him, but I was thankful that he didn’t say anything. He breathed deeply and then forced a crooked smile to his lips.
“Come,” he said, taking my hand. “I’m hungry.”
We entered the kitchen and Rune, in his loose shirt from the previous night, strode over to the cold storage and returned with a platter of fruits and cheese already sliced up into bite-sized pieces. He set it on the table and stood on the opposite side of me, leaning on his elbows while he began picking at a pile of purple grapes. I took what looked like a dried apricot from the platter and bit into it, sitting on a stool. I still had the flower in my other hand and kept turning it gently, glancing at it now and then.
“So,” I asked. “When you said you were close with the king, what you meant to say was that youarethe king.”
He flashed another heart-melting smirk, one of his sharp fangs peaking from behind his lips.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But I also said it’s complicated.”
“You’re one and the same. How’s that complicated?”
He took in a long breath and stood up straight, chewing on a grape while holding three more in his hand.
