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But I’m acquainted with the shadows.
I learned long ago to make them my friends.
So while the queen believes she’s breaking me, I lull myself to sleep with the sound of her son’s screams.
When I sleep, I sleep well.
Because I am nothing if not defiant.
I’m wokenby the screech of metal against metal. It jolts me from a dream—one that I suppose most would consider a nightmare, where I’m melting off the face of a sniveling boy who looks nothing like Nox.
I’m on my feet in an instant, but I’m not yet fully recovered from my own wounds, and the movement is too sudden. My feet go numb against the stone floor, needles of sharp pain prickling in my legs.
It’s still dark, so I don’t see him when he catches me.
I just feel him. His arms sure and steady as they lock underneath mine, his heart pounding as my cheek collides with his chest.
I hardly feel them, but I think my tears are soaking his shirt.
He says nothing as he lowers me to the ground and sets my back against the base of the dais.
Then his touch is gone, and its absence hurts worse than any ache I experienced while his venom worked its way out of my system.
“Nox…” My voice is weak with disuse.
“You might want to cover your eyes,” he says, his equally hoarse.
I frown, and panic wells inside me. Did I underestimate how fully Nox’s burns would heal? Have I scarred him permanently?
Does he think I won’t wish to look at him?
But then a flame flares in a nearby lantern, and the light sears my vision. I slam my eyes shut and cover them with my hands.
I wait for the gentle tease. Theyou didn’t listen, why am I not surprised?But it doesn’t come.
Vials clank and rattle across the room.
When I peek my eyes open for the fifth time and pain doesn’t scour my senses, I search for Nox. He’s at the workstation, mixing something foul into the vials. His back is turned to me, but I scour his neck, his forearms and hands as he works.
The sigh is instinctual when I see no scars.
It doesn’t stop the urge to run my fingers over his skin, to slide his sleeves up his forearms and check for the evidence of the pain I inflicted on his body.
The past few days, stuck in the dark cell with only my thoughts to keep me company, I’ve relished in Farin’s screams, in punishing him for what he’s done to Nox.
But now that I see my friend, guilt washes over me in thick waves, the type too dense to wade through.
“Nox, I’m so sorry…I didn’t—”
“Stop.”
My words get stuck in my throat, and the harshness in his tone digs into my sides like cramps after a long race.
“Don’t you ever apologize to me again. Not after what I did to you,” he says.
The urges are back, to wrap my arms around him and hold him and never let him go, but when I make to cross the room, his ears tilt backward on his head and his entire body goes stiff.
Does he still thirst for me? Can he remember the taste of my blood?
