Page 118 of A Throne of Blood and Ice

Silence falls between us, and perhaps it’s because I’ve never been good with silence, never at peace with it, that I ask for something terribly cruel.

“Tell me about tomorrow,” I say.

Nox looks at me then, and when he does, the weight that lifts from his brow threatens to crush me. “Tomorrow,” he says, then lets out a startled huff. “Tomorrow I take home the most breathtaking girl in the world, and I introduce her to my mother. Tomorrow I live again, Blaise. We live again.”

His eyes shutter again, and I know what he’s thinking. Still in the dark. Still a creature of the night. And I wish I could take his hand, but the symbols stand between us now, guarding the path like dutiful soldiers.

I realize then that I have to tell him. Not about my death, but about how I feel about the tomorrow he imagines. “Tomorrow sounds great,” I say, “but even if it never came, I’d be pretty content with today.”

Nox smiles, but as he turns the words over in his head, a shadow slinks on the corners of his lips.

He opens his mouth, but I don’t get to hear what he says.

A cool shiver runs down my spine, and I am no more.

CHAPTER39

NOX

Blaise is still smiling when she changes.

When the innocent, sun-soaked grin fades from her face and bleeds into an inky smirk.

There’s a cracking sound, and for a single horrifying moment, I think it’s her neck as she snaps her head back, lifts her chin to the sky and the stone ceiling that obscures it.

But it’s not Blaise’s neck that cracks.

It’s her hip.

She lets out a single garbled moan, the pulse in her neck exposed with her posture.

Blaise changes.

Her thin legs, which she’s only recently managed to put a few pounds on with all the rolls I’ve been sneaking her from the kitchen, bulge in the previously loose-fitting pants I scrounged for her from the servants’ laundry room.

I trace that wretched cracking sound to its origins, and I watch as her hips expand, as her bones rip apart and sew themselves back together.

Her breasts swell next, and her sunken cheeks, deprived of sunlight, fill out.

Blaise’s raven hair is bleached before my very eyes—the bridge of her nose compressed, her wild brows tamed, her lips plumped.

“NO.” The word escapes my mouth too late, because the woman who is not Blaise shoots a seductive grin in my direction and stands, tugging at her skin-tight pants to readjust them to fit her form better.

She takes a moment and traces the shape of Blaise’s body—no, not Blaise’s body—with her hungry gaze. And then she turns her attention to me.

“Well, hello there, Nox. Have you missed me?”

My muscles twitchin my calves, ready to pounce, aching to rip to shreds this woman—this being—who ruined Blaise’s life, but I can’t. Not when this is Blaise’s body—changed, warped, defiled, sure—but still Blaise’s.

Her voice is sultry, her smile feline as she glances me over, her gaze lingering in places that have me wishing I hadn’t shed my robes earlier, leaving me in just my thin shirt and pants.

“Who are you?” I find myself asking. Not because I don’t already know, but because I have no idea what went wrong with the extraction, and I need time to think, time to figure out how to reverse what has happened.

The spell should have extracted the parasite.

This shouldn’t be happening.

Cinderella traces a long, slender finger up the side of her body, caressing its shape. “You don’t remember me then?” She pouts, but I can tell it’s feigned, meant to send my mind whirring in all sorts of lewd places it is certainly not at the moment. “But we had such fun together.” She traces her full lips with her fingers, as if remembering a specific taste, and I shudder.

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