Reaching for the stone and shell hanging around my neck, he tucks them down the front of my top, pinching buttons through their holes until they’re secured all the way to my throat.
I swallow, painfully aware of his closeness—his paused fingers.
The silence between us seems to draw its own breaths, bearing a full-bodied weight and pressing against me, demanding attention.
He shifts, hands landing on my shoulders like weights, and I dare a peek at his eyes ...
There’s a sincerity there—an openness that binds me with his attention, tending wounds that were beginning to turn septic.
I can’t help but revel in it.
Does he know he sustains me? Gives me everything and nothing all at once?
My next breath is nowhere near as satisfying as the last, as if nothing compares to the sips ofhimhe feeds me.
Tortures me with.
“Orlaith,” he says, voice a little raspy. “Are you ready?”
No.
Beyond those doors, we cease to be alone.
Beyond those doors, what we have in this small, disencumbered moment becomes overburdened with the weight of reality.
Even so, I nod.
His hands fall and he spins, shielding me while he tugs the door open, the rusty hinges releasing a pained groan.
The rush of chilled air hits me.
Gray light spills from the expanding void as Rhordyn steps forward. I follow, leashed to his essence—a puppet to every shift of his booted feet.
Murmurings abate as we move into the room crammed full of restless energy. I glance around, taking in the rocky dome of space that’s much like a tomb, or at least how I picture tombs to be from the books I’ve read; a gloomy void, dull and dramatic.
A blade of muddy light shafts through a single open window cut from the peak of the dome, landing on the round stone table dominating the room. The light penetrates the rusty grate covering a hole in the middle of it, piercing down into the guts of who the hell knows what.
I hate this room—can feel the ghosts of past conversations caught in the crypt of it like they’re tangible things. And it’s cold.
Bone-jarring cold.
When I first cracked open that old wooden door to discover this place tucked into the castle’s heart, I backpedaled like my ass was on fire.
One peek, that’s all I needed to know this is not a happy space. It just ... bothered me. Still does, the feeling slightly overridden by my heart-cinching anxiety at the sheer amount of people seated around the huge, circular table, looking at me with barely veiled curiosity.
My skin pebbles, spine stiffening.
There must be over fifty pairs of eyes on me—one big circle ofnope.
Rhordyn grips the back of one of the few spare chairs and lifts, walks it back a step, then places it on the ground again.
My gaze docks in his pewter eyes.
He motions for me to sit with a jerk of his chin, hands still gripping the seat. But my feet are mortared in place.
Chairs scraping across the ground only bother me a little, yet he must have noticed ...
“Milaje.”
