The needle’s sharp tip turns red from the lick of the candle flame, blazing with a fiery heartbeat. I whip it away and shake it out.
Vicious little thing.
Waiting for it to cool, I sit cross-legged on my bed and flit my gaze around the room, sweeping over the curved, obsidian walls pierced with large, domed windows every few feet. Between them, paintings big and small decorate the stone, pressed on with a homemade glue.
The gentle bend is only kind to things that yield, and I refuse to wake every morning to sullen walls that have no color splashed across them. I see enough ofthatwalking around the castle every day.
All my furniture has been made to fit the space—a curved dresser, my four-poster bed with a headboard that arcs, even my bath molds against the stone cylinder of the central stairwell. Against the outer wall, a narrow table sweeps around a quarter of the circumference, its surface littered with bunches of dried flowers, numerous mortar and pestles, little jars of bits and bobs ... and rocks. Lots of sable rocks in various shapes and sizes, many dressed or half-dressed in colorful brushstrokes.
Turning my back on a smooth rock is always a challenge. Nine times out of ten, they end up stashed in my bag, carted up my tower, and assaulted with a paintbrush.
The exterior of my central stairwell has a fireplace and a wooden door pressed into it—the only way in or out of my chamber, unless you count the dramatic drop over the edge of the balcony’s balustrade.
A few years ago, I painted that door black, then spent nine months embellishing it with a littering of luminous stars that perfectly depict the night sky. There’s even a moon half steeped in shadow.
Something I can look at when the clouds are dense and angry.
I press the needle’s tip against the pad of my middle finger until I feel a painful pinch, and a bulb of bright red blood races to the surface of the tiny wound.
My lips curl.
It shouldn’t give me so much satisfaction, watching myself bleed like this. But it does. Because this blood, this little act of self-harm, it’s not for me.
It’s forhim.
Rhordyn.
I place the needle on a clay plate atop my bedside table, then dip my finger in the belly of a crystal goblet half-full of water.
The liquid blushes pink—the color of a healthy, mid-spring bloom.
I sigh, wondering if he’ll like it. If he’ll think it too pink or too red? He never complains, never saysanythingabout it, and that’s just the issue.
Not knowing.
Swirling the flush contents, I pad toward the exit and drop to a kneel, now eye level with the smaller door cut into the thick, aged wood speckled with hand-painted stars.
The Safe.
That’s the name Cook gave it when I was too small to do my offering on my own. It stuck with me.
I’ve measured my life by this wee door—by my need to first stretch onto tippy toes, then stand flat-footed, then bend at the hip to access it.
Pulling it open, I reveal an empty cavity not much larger than my crystal goblet. Its walls are rough and grooved, as though hacked into existence by an irate hand.
I set my offering on the base; a pretty parallel to its cell of unrefined wood.
As always, I envy the stupid goblet for the way it’s about to be gripped and cradled and drunk from ...presumably.
It gets so close to everything I shouldn’t want, and has therefore earned itself my unrequited hate.
I shut The Safe, drop onto my bum, and slide back across the floor, arms knotted around my knees while I study the two doors—so very different from each other.
One, I often choose to keep closed, using it as a barrier to block out the world whenever I feel the need to stow away. The smaller of the two, I wish I could keep open at this time of night so I could look Rhordyn in the eyewhile he takes my offering.
I tried it once ... a year ago. Sat here barely blinking until well after midnight. He only came once I slammed The Safe shut and severed the bridge.
That’s when it dawned on me just how much trouble I’m in.
