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I tug myself away over the short remaining space to the very edge of the mattress and flip around to face him. “This wasn’t— I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
Stavros peers back at me, his damaged eyes unfocused in a way he doesn’t usually allow them to appear when he’s fully alert. He knits his brow. “Of course you didn’t. You barely even wanted to sleep in the bed.”
The tension keeps constricting around my ribs like a vise. My swallow brings back an echo of the burn of the rope around my throat. “I stayed on my side. I didn’t even realize you’d moved until you were already right there.”
He frowns and seems to stir himself into greater wakefulness. “I’m not upset. That was—” His head twitches to sharpen his vision. “Curse it all, Ivy, don’t look at me like that.”
My hands ball between us. “Like what?”
“Like you’re fucking terrified of me.”
My mouth opens and closes again. I stare back at him, and the only honest thing I can say spills out. “What if Iamscared of you?”
I don’t think I’m imagining the pain that flickers through Stavros’s expression. He shifts his hand toward me but stops before it touches my face, maybe noting the stiffening of my posture.
“I’ve told you how sorry I am,” he says hoarsely. “I swear I don’t see you as a threat anymore. Gods above, I trust you… as much as I trust anyone in this place.”
And there it is. My lungs constrict so tightly I can barely breathe.
I push myself into a sitting position, every part of me braced to run. “But you don’t trust me completely. Or you wouldn’t feel like you needed to qualify that statement.”
Stavros gives a ragged laugh. “This is how I was trained. I don’t trust anyone completely—not even myself. It doesn’t matter.”
The bottom of my stomach has dropped out. I scramble right off the bed, snatching at my discarded dress.
“Of course it fucking does,” I retort. “You can laugh about it, because it doesn’t matter toyou. But what it means to me is you could change your mind back again at any moment, after any mistake, and I’d find myself with a noose around my neck after all.”
“Ivy.” Stavros jerks upright in my wake, but I’m already darting past the bedroom door.
I haul my gown down over me as hastily as I can and toss my cloak over the undone laces. Grabbing my boots, I tuck them under my arm with my balled underskirt.
Every motion, every brush of my drawers against my sensitized parts, reminds me of what an idiot I was just a few moments ago.
With a thump of the covers, Stavros’s footsteps barge after me. “Ivy, you have to listen to me—”
No. Listening to him is how I ended up in his bed to begin with.
I bolt for the door and flee down the hall with my cloak flapping around me.
Thirty-Seven
Ivy
From the bathing room I ducked into, I hear the creak of Stavros’s footsteps stalking by down the hall. He doesn’t know where I’ve gone, though.
I assume he stopped to pull on trousers before he rushed out of his quarters after me, and that gave me a decent head start.
He’s not so indiscreet as to bellow my name and wake half the school’s staff. After several minutes, the footsteps retrace their path.
I catch a rasp of a frustrated exhalation. The distant thump of a door closing.
Then there’s only silence.
I can’t quite rouse myself into action until the palace bell peals through the night—just one ring. Stavros and I turned in pretty early, but I’ve barely gotten any sleep.
Oh, well. That’s typical these days. I’m sure as shit not going back to Stavros’s quarters tonight, not even to take the sofa.
I don’t love the idea of hiding in the bathing room all night either, though. Everything around me is hard and cold. But I’ll need to be properly dressed before I venture farther.
