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“It’s just you,” I whisper, my heart aching.
He advances on me, and typically I find it thrilling when he’s this close, close enough for me to feel his hot breath on my face, but now I suddenly have the urge to shrink myself, to scurry through the slats in the wood paneling.
“Does anyone else know?”
“I told you—Clarissa and the cook and the maid…”
“That I’m the father? Does anyone know that I’m the father?”
I blink then, and when I do, it’s like I’ve had a layer of filth over my eyes that’s just been wiped away, and I start to notice the ugly parts of Derek. The parts my eyes usually overlook. Like how his lip curls up in a sneer when something doesn’t go his way, or the way his nose flares when he’s angry, giving him the look of a flustered child.
But Derek is not a child.
“No, of course not,” I say.
Something like relief washes over his face, and when it sloshes off of him and onto me, I feel as though I might drown in it.
But there’s something worse than the drowning. There’s something lurking below the surface, a monster hiding in the shadows.
“Derek, we have to…you have to marry me. You must.” It comes out like a plea, and I hate that it has to come out of my mouth at all. The man is the one who is supposed to propose marriage, not the other way around. My lips feel smeared with grime just for speaking the words.
A shadow passes over his face, and that thing lurking in the corners of my gut stills for a moment, waiting.
“Okay. Of course, Blaise. Of course we’ll marry,” he says, taking my small hands in his calloused ones as he presses his lips to my fingers.
The monster under the surface is still there.
I realize when he leaves to return to his chores that I was expecting him to touch my belly before he left, to feel for his baby growing inside of me.
He doesn’t, and when I ask around for him an hour later, the head maid informs me that Derek is gone, and that if she knows men at all, she doesn’t expect he’ll be back.
CHAPTER9
BLAISE
Nox continues to bring me hot food—steamed dumplings filled with shredded lamb, broccoli dripping with garlic butter, chilled lemon pies lined with a flaky crust that seems to dissolve as soon as it hits my tongue.
Pecan tarts have even started to make an appearance.
The hot food he brings, but each day my plate is suspiciously lacking any utensils sharper than a spoon.
I suppose that’s only fair.
The strength returns to my body drop by drop, and the layer of fat that usually coats my thighs and belly forms like a puddle underneath a leaky faucet. I’m healthier than I was when I first awoke, though the lack of sunlight leaves my already pale skin looking almost translucent.
I’m still not as pale as Nox, whose milk-white skin looks as though it’s never been struck by a ray of sunlight.
Though I am growing healthier, it’s clear Nox is not. The shadows underneath his eyes that I noted upon our first encounter have seeped toward his cheekbones, gaining ground every day. He’s constantly pinching his forehead, and when he looks at me, it’s as though he has to strain to get my image to come into focus.
If he were human, I would assume he’d fallen ill, but he’s fae, and the fae aren’t supposed to succumb to sickness.
And if they do, something has gone horribly wrong.
I shouldn’t be worrying about Nox. I’ve heard stories of girls who develop unhealthy attachments to their captors, and I’m fairly sure fretting over their wellbeing is like telling myself I can balance on the edge of a cliff on only my big toe.
But the male brings me pastries—often of the pecan variety now that he suggested as much to his cook after I gave him the idea—so what else am I to do but fret over his wellbeing?
He stands across the dimly lit room, his back turned to me as it so often is. It’s been days since he’s forced me back into my restraints, and the raw flesh that marks my wrists is just beginning to heal. I perch on the ledge of my table-bed, watching him slice a grayish root before pulverizing it with a pestle and mixing it into a brownish liquid.
