They simply accepted it.
Erevos knew what they had done every moment Lyssena had been with him and not there.
He had considered retrieving the belongings she had left behind in her room—the small objects her hands had touched daily, the fabrics that still carried her scent—but he was uncertain. He did not know whether surrounding her with fragments of her former life would comfort her or awaken a desire to return.
And that, he could not allow.
So for now, he let his songbird grow accustomed to the world that was new to her. He wanted her to like him.
Tochooseto stay withhim.
Erevos passed the long counters and the tall pantry shelves, the large wooden table in the corner of the kitchen, and made his way to the concealed chamber beyond, the hidden room where he kept a deer alive for the sole purpose of slaughtering it fresh for Lyssena.
He had claws to tear through flesh and sinew.
And he had shadows he knew how to coax into flame.
When he passed through the wall to where the deer lay sleeping, he felt something shift.
His songbird was removing the shadows from herself.
She lifted the mask first, peeling it away from her face, and then asked the suit to loosen and reshape itself into a dress once more. Erevos felt all of it.
As he wrapped his hand around the deer’s neck, preparing to snap it cleanly, he felt something else, a gentle caress along the threads of his shadows.
Lyssena was touching the feathers of her mask.
She stroked them lightly, and he felt every movement.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lavish and Unseen
Lyssena
The feathers were soft, and for some reason, very, very warm.
But that was the least of Lyssena’s concerns.
She did not know how she felt. Whether it was anger, or violation, or something else entirely. That uncertainty was what unsettled her most.
Her god—who insisted he was not a god—had just told her that he had been watching her for nearly her entire life. She did not know how to feel about that at all.
She had been taught that gods were everywhere at once, that they saw all things without needing to choose where to look, though her god claimed those gods were not real. Yet after standing face to face with Erevos, after seeing the impossible shape of him and feeling the weight of his presence, it was difficult to accept that he had known her specifically, intentionally, all that time.
One more thing, however, stood out to Lyssena.
Erevos had said he had known her for twenty years. He had not phrased it exactly like that, but Lyssena could do simple math, and if she was twenty-three, and he had known her for twenty years, then that meant he had first seen her when she was barely more than a toddler.
What had happened then?
She could not answer that question, of course. No one remembered anything clearly from that age, and the fact that there was a gap—a stretch of her life that belonged more to him than to her memory—made her chest tighten with frustration. Tears welled in Lyssena’s eyes.
She sat on her lavish bed, rubbing her eyes in her equally lavish gown, and stared at the equally lavish crown resting upon the matching drawer across the room.
Lavish.Everything was lavish now.
As she placed her new mask beside the crown, she wondered whether this abundance—this comfort, this indulgence—had made her blind to something she should have noticed sooner.
