Page 12 of Craving Their Venom
He pushes himself off me and stands, straightening his tunic. He is the victor. The Prince. He has asserted his dominance.
I rise to my feet, my body aching, my pride screaming. The rage is there, but it is now a cold, hard thing. A promise. I give him one last look, a look that conveys all the hatred and frustration and a new, burning possessiveness. Then I turn and stalk from the room, leaving him in the wreckage of his perfect, silent chamber with the prize I have lost.
For now.
8
AMARA
The wreckage of the Prince’s chambers was cleared away with silent, unnerving efficiency. The shattered vase, the overturned table, the scattered scrolls—all vanished as if they had never been. All that remains is the memory, a ghost of violence that haunts the polished stone. I am a ghost, too. Trapped in this cold, perfect room, I pace the confines of my cage, the fight between the Prince and the General replaying in my mind on an endless loop.
It was not a fight between two rivals. It was a clash of primal forces, a storm of crimson and gold, of brutal strength and cold precision. I saw in their eyes not just hatred for each other, but a terrifying, possessive hunger for me. I am the prize. The spoil of war. A piece of meat to be fought over by predators. The realization is a shard of ice in my gut.
After a day of this suffocating silence, a guard appears at my door. He does not speak, but gestures with his spear toward the corridor. My heart leaps into my throat. Am I being taken to the General? To the King?
He leads me not to the dungeons or the barracks, but to a small, unassuming door that opens into the palace gardens. Hegestures for me to enter, then pulls the door shut behind me, the sound of the bolt sliding home a final, definitive click. I am still a prisoner, but my cage has expanded.
The garden is a place of alien beauty. It is nothing like the soft, green chaos of the forests I know. Here, everything is deliberate, controlled. The ground is covered not in grass, but in fine, crimson sand that glitters under the strange, purple light of the sky. The plants are skeletal and elegant, with leaves of black silk and flowers that bloom in impossible shades of sapphire and amethyst. The air is still and cool, carrying the faint, spicy scent of the blue-barked trees that line the high stone walls. It is beautiful, but it is a cold, sterile beauty. A garden designed by a being who understands aesthetics, but not life.
I walk along a path of smooth, black river stones, my bare feet sinking slightly into the red sand. The silence here is different from the silence of my chamber. It is alive. I can hear the whisper of the wind through the black leaves, the soft chime of crystal ornaments hanging from the branches of a skeletal tree.
I find a stone bench carved into the garden wall and sink onto it. I feel a sliver of something that might be mistaken for peace. I am still a captive, but here, under the open sky, I can almost pretend I am just a girl sitting in a garden. I close my eyes, and for a a moment, I can almost smell the pine trees of my home.
“It is a space of profound order.”
The voice is a soft whisper, yet it cuts through the silence like a blade. My eyes snap open. Kaelen, the mystic, stands before me. He appeared without a sound, as if he simply coalesced from the shadows between the blue trees. He wears simple, dark robes, and his iridescent silver-blue scales seem to drink the purple light of the sky, shimmering with a soft, internal luminescence.
My heart gives a painful lurch. I am not alone. I am never truly alone.
“It is beautiful,” I manage to say, my voice tight.
“Beauty and order are not the same as peace,” he replies, his gaze not on the garden, but on me. It is an unnerving gaze, one that seems to bypass my physical form entirely and peer directly into the tangled mess of my soul. It feels more invasive than the General’s brutal assessment, more intimate than the Prince’s cold appraisal. “Do you find peace here, Amara?”
He knows my name. Of course he does. He seems to know everything.
“I find… quiet,” I say, choosing my word carefully.
He gives a small, sad smile. “Quiet is a rare commodity in this palace. You should cherish it.” He moves closer, his steps silent on the sandy path. He does not sit beside me, but crouches before me, bringing himself to my level. The gesture is one of respect, yet it only serves to heighten the intensity of his focus. His eyes, the color of a twilight sky, are filled with a galaxy of ancient sorrows.
“The General is a creature of instinct,” he says. “He sees a thing of beauty and wishes to possess it, to consume it. The Prince is a creature of ambition. He sees a useful tool and wishes to control it, to wield it. They see you as an object. A prize. A problem.” He pauses, his gaze deepening. “I see a soul in torment. And I wish to understand it.”
His words are a strange mix of comfort and terror. He is the only one who has acknowledged my inner world, my spirit. But he speaks of it as if it is a scroll to be deciphered, a cosmic riddle to be solved.
“There is nothing to understand,” I whisper, pulling my arms around myself. “I am just a human woman, stolen from her home.”
“No,” he says, his voice gentle but firm. “You are not. The threads of destiny, which have been snarled and frayed for generations, have suddenly pulled taut. And you, Amara, are the knot that holds them all together.” He leans forward slightly, his presence overwhelming. “Tell me, what do you dream of, when you are permitted to sleep in your gilded cage?”
The question is so unexpected, so deeply personal, that I am momentarily stunned into silence. Varos asked of my motives. Zahir of my teeth. Kaelen asks of my dreams.
“I… I dream of the forest,” I stammer. “Of the stream behind my village. I dream of my mother’s face.” The admission feels like a betrayal, a baring of my soft, vulnerable underbelly to a predator.
“You dream of what you have lost,” he murmurs, his eyes filled with a profound empathy that is almost painful to witness. “And what do you fear? Not the General’s rage or the Prince’s coldness. What is the fear that lives in the very marrow of your bones?”
This is too much. His gaze is too piercing, his questions too sharp. He is peeling me back, layer by layer, and I have no defense against this gentle, relentless assault.
“I fear being forgotten,” I whisper, the words torn from a place deep inside me I did not know existed. “I fear that I will die in this place, and no one in my world will ever know what became of me. I will simply… cease to be.”
A single tear escapes and traces a hot path down my cheek. Kaelen reaches out, his movement slow and deliberate. He does not wipe the tear away. His thumb, the skin cool and smooth over his scales, gently touches the crescent birthmark at the base of my neck. The touch is feather-light, reverent. It sends a shiver through me that has very little to do with fear and everything to do with a strange, terrifying sense of beingseen.
