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Jolting upright, my hands fall from my hair and slap to my sides. I throw a wild look around the bedchamber—before my eyes land on him.
Prince Daein has drawn up a chair to the side of the water-mirror. He sits in it, his legs kicked out, boots off and shirt unbuttoned, holding in his loose grip a bottle of wine. The stink of the wine tickles my nose ... but not the back of my throat. The white powder has had time to sink into my system.
Watching me from beneath his long, dark lashes, the prince brings the bottle to his purple-stained lips and takes a hefty drink. It doesn’t take me more than a heartbeat to realise that he’s drunk.
Darkness crawls up his face from the moodily-lit room. It must be the Quiet. I’ve been gone all day from my duties.
Hilda must be in a fit. The prince must be furious with me.
Urgency strikes through me. I throw the sheets from my body and make to scramble off the bed. But before I can even lift my bum from the mattress, the prince stops me. He holds up his hand, palms flattened against the thick air, and warns me with the danger in his darkened face.
Once I’m stilled on the bed, stiff like as though I’ve been frozen in place by the storms of his eyes, he lowers his hand to the arm of the leather chair he sits lazily on like a throne. He has that about him, a tired power that radiates from his very pores.
Darkly, he tells me, “The entire time I was gone, I thought of your flesh—of all its imperfections and perfections.” My cheeks start to burn under his dangerous stare. “I thought of your belly, that always looks to be slightly swollen, no matter your hunger. I thought of the bruises on your thigh, the freckle at your opening. None of that is what troubles me.” He sets aside his bottle of wine on the tree stump, never tearing his gaze from mine. Slowly, he pushes up from the chair. “What troubles is me is what Iwondered.”
He turns my insides to ice, but burns me with a heat I’ve never known at the same time. I don’t know whether to be terrified or not as he advances on me.
“I wondered,” he says as I shrink back, “what you did in your village.”
I blink, leaning back on my tense arms, a mist of confusion settling over me. I frown at him, my knees drawn up, as though I’m ready for flight.
“Tell me.”
“I ...”
The prince presses his knee into the mattress and leans closer to me. His hand reaches out for my ankle, hot against my skin—even through the stocking I wear. His eyes are locked with mine as he drags me to him until I’m lying flat beneath his curved body.
“I sometimes paid the taxes,” I tell him in a whisper. “And mother taught me to cook when my energy was best—”
He cuts me off with a cold, hard tone, “What did youenjoy?”
The urge to give a bitter laugh takes me, but I fight it off. Enjoyment is for the dark and light fae. Not for my kind.
There is little a human can do in my village that wouldn’t bring down the wrath of the fae upon us.
Still, I have to answer him. I have to think of something.
I lick my lips nervously. “I like stories. My grandparents would tell me stories when they were alive.”
Still curved over me, hands pressed into the mattress on either side of my head, he watches me closely. “Stories,” he echoes after a moment. “What kind?”
“Ones of the old world,” I confess. “And about the morke, the dokkalves, litalves. Any kind of story, really.”
He cocks his head to the side, a small smirk ghosting over his lips. “Which is your favourite?”
“Weddings,” I whisper, shame creeping onto my cheeks. “They used to have these things called weddings in my world, but before ... before the darkness came. And they were white and big and beautiful and everyone would be dancing—”
“We have them here,” he tells me, the smirk growing. “I am aware of what they are.”
My whole face is pink now as I nod under him.
“What do you do while I am gone from the castle?” he asks.
I cut a look down between us for a beat. “Swim in the lake, mostly.”
“Why?”
I suck in my lips for a moment before I answer, “I like to chase the fish.”
