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She shrugs and avoids my gaze. Her hands knot around her dress. Firelight sparkles on the multicolored jewels sprinkled around the edges of her mask. A modest mask, nothing gaudy.
She doesn’t come from wealth, yet she dares ignore me?
Bewilderment prickles alongside the curiosity. “Do you not speak?”
A head shake. She still doesn’t look up.
“Ah. Forgive me.”
I can’t stop the frown. What noblewoman is part autumn fey, part winter fey, and mute? I let my gaze sweep over her again. She strikes me as so familiar. But I would have remembered such a rarity.
Might as well ask.
“Do I know you? Have we met?”
Something like a ripple goes through her. She stills, her hands relaxing. Her attention remains on the floor between us. Then, ever so slowly, she peeks up. And her river-deep gaze, the same swirling mixture of green and blue that I’ve tried for seven years to drown out, crashes into mine.
Her.
Here.
Nausea wars with shock. I recoil, scramble backward a step, clutch a handful of the nearest tablecloth.
She’s…beautiful.
Somehow even more beautiful than my dreams allow me to remember. Dizzyingly beautiful. Breathtakingly alluring in ways I had either forgotten or never seen. My skin pulses, aching to touch her, feel her hand in mine, caress her soft face. Wrench the mask off her face and kiss her until the wound she inflicted stops unraveling me.
I start to speak and nearly choke on her name, a name I’ve said more times than I can count. A name she first told me through a whimper when I found her crying in the garden. A name I’ve whispered against her feverish lips, snarled and moaned and screamed in the silence of my tent when the fire of her betrayal threatened to rip me apart. The name of a girl I want to erase, scrub from every facet of my mind, yet cannot take my eyes off of now that she’s right in front of me again.
“Alia.”
With a shuddery sigh, she presses her lips together and tips her chin up to meet my gaze. I can’t mistake the wince. “Hello, Kirran.”
ChapterFour
ALIA
Reena was right. Kirran is just as handsome as ever.
He’s broader in the shoulders and taller, with a ruggedness to him that surely has come from the years he spent at war. His gold eyes are just as piercing as I remember, a sharp contrast to his brown, black, and scarlet attire. Or is it in part a soldier’s uniform? I can’t look away from his face long enough to check, but he looks somewhere between prince and soldier.
Then again, he is now.
I allow myself a timid smile. For two breaths, he holds my gaze just like he used to. Before I take a third, he spins on his heel and is gone.
The image of his back as he storms away sends a chill through me. My throat tightens, but I can’t make myself move. The memory hits like a kick to the gut, and I double over, one arm tight around my stomach as my insides protest what I’ve done in coming here where I am clearly unwelcome. Again.
It’s too much. I can’t do this.
I slap my other hand over my mouth and scramble my way past the masked attendees. Voices and puzzled remarks bleed through my ears. I squeeze my eyes shut as I plunge out the open balcony doors. I make it to the spiral-trunked trees just beyond the exit before the tears erupt.
Seven years ago, at his birthday ball, he actually spoke to me, said more than just my name. Though it couldn’t be called a conversation so much as mockery and laughter. His words, I don’t recall anymore. They’ve thankfully weakened with time. Or perhaps my heart, in its feeble attempt at comfort, has allowed me to forget the more brutal part of our ending.
But the way his eyes flashed then — and how they just did now — throws me back into the past, slamming me under a current I can’t escape.
The beautiful memories come first, tricking me with their innocence, disguising the pain yet to come. The way he’d grinned at me as he invited me to his birthday ball, telling me of his intentions to introduce me to his family as his chosen bride. The dress he’d given me. The way I’d floated through the next two days, gotten ready for the ball, hurried there through the back halls.
I strain to stop, gripping the stone before me.
