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All I could do was sit still, a charred mark across the ground where the bowl had once been. Smoke curled into the cold air around me. My breathing was heavy and my mind sodden.
I cried, but not out of sadness. There was no such emotion when it came to my mother. Only fury. It burned within me long after the physical flames across the garden died out, no longer fuelled by the ground. I studied the halo of scorched grass around me, as though a star had fallen from the heavens and kissed where I sat.
There was no hiding this from Marius. He would see and question. The perfect, circular sigil of charred grass and dirt had no natural explanation. I held my shaking hands before me to see the small licks of fire still curling around my fingers.
Anger was the passion needed to keep it alight. And I was riddled with it.
It was long into the day when I finally picked myself up from the ground and walked back towards the castle’s entrance. Night would soon arrive. Marius would soon wake.
And I would tell him. Reveal everything to him because keeping it hidden would kill me sooner than the arrival of the fateful final day.
I dragged myself back through the castle doors, slowly taking the steps up towards the level of his chamber where he would still be soundlessly asleep.
There was a small part of me who pleaded with my soul to keep quiet. To do as Mother had wished, what I had trained for all these years.
But as I slipped back into the room and saw Marius’s placid face resting upon the swan-feathered pillow, I almost broke down entirely.
He would be free,I told myself as I slipped into the sheets beside him with a warm tear running down my cheek, pulling the sheets up to my chin to try and stop the incessant shivering. Free of the curse keeping him bound here. Free from the trauma and memories that the very walls reminded him of daily.
I closed my eyes,not bothering to clear the wet streaks from my face. And I would be free. Free of Mother and the burden that my life presented.
It was easier to fall into sleep when realisation struck. If Marius killed me, I would no longer be required or reminded of the point of my own existence. Weight lifted from my body mere moments before I drifted into a dreamless, empty and peaceful sleep.
23
It was Marius’s wandering hands that woke me. His gentle touch coaxed me from the deep sleep I had lost myself within. Tickling fingers trailed shapes around my thigh which sent shivers across my bare skin. I was facing away from him, but his body was pressed firmly into my back. Each of us slightly curved enough to fit into one another’s embrace like two pieces of a puzzle. Pieces that did not fit together, but were forced together and ruined in the process. Yes, that was what we were.
Stifling a yawn, I attempted to stretch out but his cool body kept me trapped within his limitations.
“Can we stay in bed all day?” Marius whispered, pressing a prolonged kiss to the back of my head. His voice was hoarse and raspy, but lighter than it had been the nights past. “I do not feel ready to face the night ahead just yet. Let it be me and you, just us. Just like this. And please do not make me beg.”
He slipped a hand beneath my side and wrapped the other atop me. One strong tug and I was firmly in his grasp. And I did not want him to let go. Not even with the bubbling sickness that brewed within, or the haunting knowing of what was to come.
I was still fighting back against the want to fall back into sleep. It was peaceful there. A place without the need to think. Waking this evening felt as though I had been thrust out of a body of warm water into a winter storm.
I barely managed to form words together in agreement. All that came out of my mouth was a string of mumbled, long sounds.
“You are dressed,” Marius announced, tugging at the shirt on my back. “But when I last left you I am certain your body was exposed.”
My eyes sprang open at his comment. I shifted beneath the sheets and felt the material that Marius still played with at my thigh.
“I was cold.” The lie slipped out before I had a chance to claw it back. I had to tell him what I knew of Katharine eventually. And with it the reasoning of how I knew. I was suddenly glad to have my back to him as I was certain my pinched and twisted expression would have given my secrets away.
“Are you now?” His voice rumbled.
“No.”
As I said it, his wandering hands quickened in pace as he gripped onto the material of the trousers with full fists and begun tugging them down off my legs. I groaned as the chill of his fingers skimmed up my leg, knowing the trousers were now discarded on the chamber’s floor.
“And what of the shirt… do you need it to keep warm now?”
I paused, my breathing shuddering. “No,” I said again.
Marius snickered, fingers moving as preciously as a spider weaving a web. Button by button he undid the shirt without needing to be standing before me, all whilst he still lay beside me, his heavy breathing prickling the back of my neck.
There was something different about him. How his hands, although gentle, seemed rushed.
Urgent.
