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Resplendent in rose gold, Thea was magnetic, and the way she was looking at him, with her lush mouth slightly parted, was as though she didn’t quite believe he was real, as though amillion words were on her lips, and she couldn’t find the right one.
‘No sharp remarks for me today, Princess?’ he said quietly, but his voice threatened to fracture beneath the weight of everything it had taken to get to this point.
‘You…’ Her grip on his shoulder tightened, like she needed to reassure herself he wasn’t a figment of her imagination. ‘You were training me all along,’ she whispered, her eyes lined with tears.
Beneath his mask, his brows shot up. ‘You said you threw it away… The gift.’
‘I did.’ She followed his lead through another series of waltz steps. ‘But I got it back.’
The dance was a perilous game, teetering on the precipice of discovery – but it was important, Wilder knew, more than important that they have this moment, for they might not get another.
He swallowed the lump in his throat and pulled her closer, so all he could breathe in was her, and that sea-salt-and-bergamot scent of hers.
‘I told myself that it was enough,’ he murmured into her hair, his voice hoarse. ‘That I should be grateful for the time we had. It was more love than most people get in a lifetime. But the truth is, Thea… A thousand lifetimes with you wouldn’t be enough.’
He wanted to kiss her, more than anything, to let everything that had stood between them fall away into nothing.
But Thea’s breath caught. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything —’
‘Later,’ he said, his hand tightening on her waist.
Her tongue swept her lips as she studied his face, her gaze growing hooded, and it was all he could do not to kiss her then, to finish what he’d started in the stables before his arrest. Heached at the thought of it, and at how close she was now, how her body hummed in response to his.
But he steeled himself. There was so much they needed to talk about, so much they needed to understand and forgive, and a ballroom was no place for such things.
‘We were going to get you out,’ she whispered with a note of desperation. ‘We had a plan.’
‘Later,’ Wilder said again, spreading his fingers so they brushed her ribs, slowing them to match the pace of the new piece the orchestra began. ‘The eclipse will start soon,’ he told her. ‘We should get to the balcony.’
‘Is this wise?’ she asked, as he led them from the heart of the waltz.
‘Wiser than continuing this dance. One of us is bound to do something stupid,’ he said, his voice low as he withdrew them from the dance floor and slipped into the crowd gathering at the balcony doors.
It had been a risk to enter the ball rather than just escape the floating domes, but Marise had argued that sometimes hiding in plain sight was better. Wilder couldn’t deny that, though he was willing to bet they didn’t have long before the guards awoke from their supposed drunken stupors and his absence from his cell was noted. There wasn’t enough wine in the world to repay Marise and Torj the favour. As for the third party involved… He wasn’t ready to think about that yet.
He noticed Thea signal to Cal and Kipp, who were a few yards away in the crowd. There hadn’t been time to brief any of them, not without risking his cover. He didn’t know which of Torj’s friends he had to thank for the formal attire or the mask, but he refused to look a gift horse in the mouth at a time like this.
Wilder brought Thea close to him, sheltering her from the jostling of the crowd as nobles fought to get a decent viewing spot from the balcony of the dome. But his apprentice gave asgood as she got, carving a path for them to one of the railings, her face bright and alert beneath her mask. He caught her stealing glances at him as they moved, her stormy gaze clouded with regret, her hand drifting to the fate stone he knew was tucked down her cleavage.
A year had passed.
A year was left.
A reality that was always at the forefront of his mind, even during the most chaotic of times. He hated that fate had Thea racing against an hourglass, that the last twelve months had not been kind to either of them, that he knew nothing of the time ahead.
When Thea next reached for the stone, he took her hand instead, stroking his thumb along the scar-flecked skin there. Thea’s lower lip trembled before she clamped it between her teeth and turned her face to the stars.
Wilder didn’t know what to expect from the eclipse, but the anticipation in the air around them was palpable. It made him uneasy, as did the crush of bodies around him. The people of Aveum, and the people of the midrealms, had been preparing for this moment for months, praying that this rare celestial event would save them all.
‘Welcome one and all,’ Queen Reyna’s voice projected across the far reaches of the crowd from a secondary balcony above. ‘Today is a monumental day in our history… A day wherein we will bear witness to the magic and glory of the Moonfire Eclipse. For too long now, the midrealms have been plagued by the prophecy thrust upon us.’
The winter queen took a deep breath before reciting:
‘In the shadow of a fallen kingdom, in the eye of the storm
A daughter of darkness will wield a blade in one hand
And rule death with the other
