AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But the images streak free.
Running into King Abbas. Fighting through the sting of his pitying words to reach Kirran in the ballroom. And the utter disgust in his eyes as he turned from the courtiers to me. The girl who was beneath him. Nothing but a servant. Good for nothing but to be used as a way to pass the time until he married someone far more suitable.
The girl who was everything his father had claimed I was.
And then the last glimpse of him as I moved to flee — him turning away and laughing with his friends over how stupid I’d been. How easy to fool. How I’d actuallybelievedhim.
His callous laughter as my heart shattered.
I yank myself free from the thoughts. Back to the present, where the man I once loved has yet again rejected me publicly, and I have yet again let him wound me.
Night air wraps around me like a robe, crisp and breezy and scented with leaves and flowers. I tip my head back, letting the soft wind caress my face, tangle in my hair. I let it hold me, for it alone is what remains to hold me.
Tears fall in hot lines down my cheeks. I press my lips together, trying my best not to make a sound. When I was a little girl and we still lived in Palla, the spring kingdom, before my stepmother got the authorization to move her family back to her nation of origin, I used to cry silently to avoid upsetting her. Or alerting her to the way her apathy cut my young heart to pieces.
She’d told me I should be thankful she had kept me on as a servant instead of throwing me to the streets like another fey would have. So I tried to be grateful. To find the good in the work, even when it was grueling and my blisters hadn’t yet become calluses. After all, my stepmother had allowed me to stay with her, in her family’s home, though I shared no blood with her and my father had passed. No matter that she had no love for me, or that my stepsisters despised and ridiculed me.
I’d felt guilty for crying.
Little did I know what would await me here. At least now, they don’t live anywhere near me.
“Why?”
Kirran’s harsh voice rips through the stillness, and I spin, nearly tripping over the heeled shoes Reena loaned me. He stands off to my right, arms crossed, drenched in the patch of darkness beyond the reach of the ballroom’s lights.
His eyes glow a soft gold, almost drawing me closer. I know better than to trust it, trust him. All that was once gentle and warm about Kirran has turned to jagged steel, razor edges of ice. Having grown up around them and being half them, I have never fully feared fey. Yet Kirran is as unpredictable as he is beautiful, and I can’t let myself be drawn in only for him to shatter me again.
“Why what?” I whisper.
A moment passes, thick and cold. Then his eyes flare against the shadows, and he unleashes a hissed, “Whyanything, Alia?”
I fight the urge to recoil, make myself smaller, and try to read the look on what I can see of his face. There’s more to his expression, I’m sure, but I can only discern a seething fury. A desperate wish rises on my tongue — that I could ask him the questions I will never have the courage to ask.
I thought we were friends, Kirran. When did that change? Why do you despise me so much? How could you treat me so cruelly? How could you go from loving me to being so repulsed by me?
My heart catches. Because it wasn’t love, merely rebellion. Wasn’t that how the king had phrased it?
How could you use me as nothing but a way to spite your father?
After a moment of wrestling back the thoughts, I manage a shaky breath. “I didn’t want to come. I only came for Reena. She begged me.” Emotion tightens my throat, but I push on. “I didn’t want to see you. Or talk to you. I promise.”
“That much is clear.”
My chest aches like a hand is pressing me into the floor. I lower my gaze. The skirt of my borrowed dress just barely catches the radiance from the ballroom. “What was I supposed to do?” My voice hitches, and I take a step back. “Would you rather I had just walked away as soon as you came over? Without saying anything?”
His scoff sounds bitter, though I can’t fathom why. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
I stare, wait. He doesn’t speak again. So I dare to. “What are you talking —”
“I’m not doing this. I didn’t even want to come back here, let alone stand here with you and reminisce —” His words dissolve into something between a groan and a growl, and he starts to turn away. But then he stiffens. Another flicker of gold burns the distance between us as he glances at me. “I don’t care what you do for the rest of the night, who you dance with, where you go afterward, or who you go there with. Just stay away from me.”
And with that, he once more starts to storm off.
“I didn’t want to believe your father, you know.” The words tumble out before I can think better of it.
He doesn’t stop, but his steps slow.
Wisdom urges me to apologize and withdraw, but I have lived too long with silence as my only answer. “I hoped that — thatsomehow, it was all just a big misunderstanding. That…” The truth dies in my throat, and I lower my gaze. “But it wasn’t, was it?”
