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“And I’ll talk to as many people as I can.”
“Think you can meet me at the middle fountain? Say just after midnight?”
“Yes.” She peers at the open door and back at me. Silence etches itself along the stones in the narrow corridor. “Um, thank you, Kirran. For being…willing to…you know.”
Willing.It’s not so much willingness as it is desperation, burning, reeling still.
Or maybe I am willing. To seek the truth, if nothing else. Talking to her tonight ended up being less painful than it would’ve been to lie awake in bed all night with my thoughts tormenting me.
Words scald my throat, but I nod. It takes a moment to gather my voice. “You, too.” A ripple of cold slices down my back from the restrained responses, and I move a step away from her. “See you tomorrow.”
Her arm twitches. For half a heartbeat, her fingertips brush my forearm, warm against my skin. In the same instant, she withdraws.
I freeze, unable to bring my gaze back to her.
“Goodnight,” she whispers. Then she ducks into the room. The door clicks shut.
And so she leaves me standing there in the hall — my throat tight, heart pattering in my ears, and the phantom of her touch sizzling through me.
Seconds trickle away. All I can do is stare at my stained arm as if part of me expects to see a smear where the color transferred to her. But of course, it remains, marring only me.
I try to lean into the surprise of that. Feel nothing else. Yet beneath it, another current simmers. And no matter how fiercely I try to rein it in, the reality remains.
She touched me. On purpose.
ChapterNine
ALIA
As soon as the door shuts, I tip my head back against the wood and close my eyes. My chest heaves, and though the feeling is fading, my fingertips still tingle from brushing Kirran’s arm. He’s stronger now. Even a glimpse of him earlier tonight should have told me that. But the rigid muscle of his arm, the warmth of his skin — I had forgotten so much about him.
I’d tried to forget everything about him.
My eyes sting. A shuddery breath breaks free.
“Alia, you nevercameto the ball.”
A wave of emotion crushes me, and I slide down the door and draw my knees up against my chest. The sobs come out strangled but relentless, wracking my body. I have cried over him so many times, but it’s usually been trickling tears down my nose and onto my pillow. Quiet whimpers in the middle of the night when I’ve woken from yet another dream that scrapes the scabs off my heart’s deepest wounds. Probably my mind, forever trying to make sense of what happened between us.
But I haven’t cried like this since that night.
Few of his words remained over the years. It’s mostly his expression that haunts me: the disgust in his gold eyes, the curl of his lip. And the way he and his friends laughed, like it was a game they were all in on. Faceless friends, people I either never knew or don’t remember. I’ve tried to run from my past. Tried to forget I was not only friends with the youngest fey prince but that he was my first…everything.
Not merely my first love — my only love — and first kiss, but my first true friend.
I met Kirran the same day I became a woman. Because I became a woman, and my stepmother did nothing to prepare me for it. Perhaps because I was only twelve and she thought she had more time, since Vallda was a year older and hadn’t bled yet. Perhaps because she didn’t care whether I would think I was dying or didn’t think it important to explain to me how these things worked.
Lady Esilla, the quartermaster, had swept me aside as soon as she’d noticed, helped me clean up and gathered fresh clothes for me, and shown me how to deal with the flow. But it was the words she’d said afterward that cut my heart to pieces.
“You poor darling. You so desperately need a mother.”
I’d smiled at her through brewing tears and slipped away, fled through the gardens, and finally crumpled at a fountain. Kirran rarely dressed like a prince, never wanted to wear the elaborate clothing. That day, he’d looked like little more than a soldier in his simple black shirt and pants. Especially with how he’d come running with a knife glinting in his right hand. Ready to defend a sobbing girl and demanding to know who hurt me, what my assailant looked like.
As soon as he realized I was alone, that I wasn’t in danger, his demeanor shifted.
Where another boy might have gone to find a woman to assist, he instead sat down beside me, offered a handkerchief, and asked for my name. Through my sniffles, I managed only that. But he stayed with me until I gathered myself.
It took a few years before I confessed the true reason I’d been crying that day.
