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I bite my lip, close my eyes, and listen to the steady beat of his heart against my ear.
“I am afraid of you, Nox,” I say, because it’s true. Because I’ve never feared anyone more in my life. “I’m just afraid of me, too.”
CHAPTER34
NOX
I’m at my desk, craning my neck over a stack of Gunter’s notes, my fingers tugging at strands of my hair and the skin on my forehead, halfway nodding off to sleep when there’s a knock on my door.
The gentle glow of the candle atop my desk warms the interior of my eyelids, which jolt open at the rapping noise. At first, I think it’s Gunter, eager to wake me with a late-night revelation he can’t keep to himself, but then I notice the way the wax dribbles down the candle, pooling into the bottom of the dish.
Pooling like Gunter’s blood on the floor.
I shove myself from the desk, sending papers scattering as the legs of my chair scrape against the ground, and stumble over to the door.
I open it to find the queen’s pale face hovering in the hallway, her body obscured in shadow as the candle she holds illuminates her face.
She reminds me of the full moon.
“What do you want?” I don’t bother with the “my queen.” It’s probably foolish of me to disrespect her so openly when my family’s wellbeing is on the line, but the queen’s been too distraught over my state to bother punishing me.
There’s nothing this female can do if not coddle.
She was there. Every second of my recovery, stroking the veins in the back of my hands with her palms, careful to trace the patches of skin the sunlight hadn’t touched.
I sang myself to sleep with fantasies of ripping her throat from her neck.
I hated her before, but now that Gunter’s dead, the hatred has warped.
Before it was hot and livid and passionate.
Now it’s numb. Cold. Slow. The way frostbite can be equally as lethal as burns.
“A delivery,” the queen says, pulling a parcel from her robes and handing it to me.
“I would have thought it was beneath your station to deliver packages.”
Indeed, the parcel is simple, wrapped in thick burlap and heavy in my hands.
“I thought you might not wish to be alone when you received this one,” she says.
My heart gives a little lurch, and I turn the parcel over in my hands.
It’s addressed to Gunter.
I feel as though the chicken blood I drank with dinner is crawling up my throat. The taste of Gunter’s blood cakes my mouth, dribbling from my lips. The coppery sourness of it burns like acid.
Gunter’s last words play on repeat as I lay awake, making me hate myself even more.
I just hope one day you might forgive me
He’d claimed that he’d never been able to replace my father, but it wasn’t true.
I hadn’t wanted him to—not at first. Not when it felt like a betrayal of the male who had sired me, raised me, loved me.
But my father would have wanted me to have a father, if I couldn’t be his son.
And I was Gunter’s son, through and through.
