He nodded. “You did your task perfectly, little ghost.” His hand ran over my now-transparent mouth, and even though I couldn’t feel it, it felt like being burned. “To reward you for your good work, I’ll let you watch.”
It took everything in me not to vomit.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Midnight Rain
MAGNOLIA
Four days.
Four days of isolation. Four days of not eating. Four days of wondering when Dahes was going to attack Hael using his dragon.
Hisdragon. I still couldn’t believe he had one. I knew he kept hundreds of beasts lurking in the depths below the castle. It shouldn’t have surprised me. It was a known fact that dragons were once ruled by Dahes and that he gifted them to Elion to end theWar of Two Kings—same way Elion gave Dahes magic. I just never put two and two together. I never imagined that it meant Dahes’ origins weredrakin, that he was a rider himself, and still had a dragon. I thought he just ruled over them, like Elion does now.
My mind raced, going through all six dragon breeds, wondering which one he was bonded to, which magic he possessed through the Vinculum bond.
It made him more terrifying. Even though I already knew he was immensely powerful, my mind kept screaming at me that this made him worse.
I didn’t mean to give him a way to defeat Hael. I didn’t mean to betray him.
It’s for the best, Magnolia.
Either way Dahes was going to punish someone I cared about. It’s better if it was Hael, better it wasn’thim, even if the thought was slowly killing me, instead of giving me comfort.
Masinwas still safe somewhere. I kept telling myself that it was enough.
My door opened, and I looked up to see Dahes leaning against the frame. I’d been sitting on my armchair, with my knees curled into my side, nervously biting my nails until my fingers bled.
He eyed me, completely unmoving for a heartbeat, before he was in my space, leaning forward and encompassing my breath.
He tsked in time with the door slamming shut behind him. “I thought we went over this already,” his hand reached forward and he pried my finger from my mouth. “This is a bad habit.”
When my slavery first started, I couldn’t stop biting into my nails. He hated anything I did that left me disfigured, but I couldn’t stop. It was compulsive. It took Dahes removing the fingers of every prisoner below the castle before I suppressed the impulse. I hadn’t even realized I started doing it again since I came back.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale.
He smiled, barely, only the slightest upward tilt of his mouth, and that’s when I noticed he was wearing his mask.
The alabaster mold perfectly formed to his face, seamlessly blending with his features. The only real difference was the horns, but he had his white cloak drawn over his head, obscuring them from view.
And if his mask was on—I swallowed. It meant we were leaving.
I hadto keep my breathing steady. Outwardly, I was a ghost, no better than the ones beneath his castle. I forgot what it felt like to be numb, that belonging to Dahes made me feel physically dead.
Inwardly, I was screaming. Dahes said Hael wouldn’t die, but I knew him well enough to know those words held little gravity.
Dahes needed to keep Hael alive in order to fight with him, but that didn’t mean he would be in one piece.
Hael was the strongest drakin in Viven, but Dahes didn’t even question if his own dragon could take him. His confidence absolutely terrified me.
I tried to avoid this, tried to make Hael seem untouchable, but instead I was the reason he was now walking into a trap. I was the reason Dahes was going to murder Aura—all because I told him he cares about nothing except duty and his dragon.
I was starting to not completely hate his dragon either. Those nights on the beach, watching her stretch out onto the sand before taking off… it made her seem less like a monster and more like a tamed pet.
But now she was going to die. The realization hit me like a brick. I was going to be forced to watch the man I was falling for get annihilated by the man I was enslaved by.
I followed Dahes through the castle like a puppet on strings. I was in my usual iridescent slip, no shoes, no undergarments—none of the necessities I was starting to get accustomed to in Viven. After the bath, the clothes I wore back here were gone.
