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“It won’t be like last time, Rina, because that man—the hopeful captain who made decisions with his heart—is dead.”
“Morning, Willie!” And then, with an entirely too innocent look in my direction, “How did you sleep?” I’ll kill him.
My ribbons swirl at her feet, keeping a respectful distance from her skin with a carefulness I don’t understand. In the two centuries I’ve wielded them, they’ve always speared for life like they’re starved for it. Always hungering for what they cannot have. But with Willa, they seem—content.
She is not mine to protect. She is mine to use.
“I think I’d take the death threats and stabbing at breakfast over whatever this is.”
“I’d like to think I have more restraint than to eye-fuck a woman at the dining table,” he replies mildly. “Even one as beautiful as Adira.”
“To be eye-fucked while eating waffles?” Willa deadpans. “I can assure you, Adira wants nothing to do with my eyes,” Sam insists with a wince. And then, after a thoughtful pause, “Or my waffles.”
I deserve the punishment of never-ending pain. Death was in my heart when the island granted me power, and it’s still there now. In almost two centuries, it has not relented.
“Gentle pity doesn’t fit you, Darling. I’d prefer your cowardice to insipid kindness.”
it’s because he personifies the very thing I chased for so long but have always been denied. Chased so furiously, my very dreams drove me to the rooftop night after night trying to achieve it.
Niko doesn’t see me; he sees what I can do for him. I’ve lived through enough to know the difference.
“You make death your cozy little pet, but balk at heights? How contrary of you.”
Niko remarks, breezing past me to kiss Adira lightly on the cheek.
“Now you’re just being unkind,” Niko says, strolling past her and ducking inside the house. He calls over his shoulder with a flourish, “My hair is never flat.”
consonance,
“How am I supposed to recognize something I’ve never felt before?” “You have felt it. Many times.”
Like reading the last page of a book without knowing how the story began.
“You wished to be invisible when the Strayed captured you on the beach, and so you became.”
“You imagined you understood Marina, and now you can.”
You’re here because during the fall, you wished to be here.”
“There is a cost to everything in life. You’ve seen the price Niko pays to be the most powerful in the kingdom. But just as our magics vary, the cost does as well.”
“It’s a curse to know every thought and feeling of those around you.
“It was Somnya, the land of dreams.” Adira’s eyes darken furiously. “Now, we reside in Letum, land of death.”
Anger at myself for being stupid enough to believe that one moment of vulnerability meant the King of Carrion, of death itself, was being honest with me.
lapses caused by Marina’s magic and its indelible cost.
though I know what it costs him to use it—absorbing my hurt as his own.
I’ve never asked her to use it, as its cost has always seemed too great: each time she fades into nothing, she becomes unseen to the person she cares about most.
I stared down at her, sobbing in the sand. Pale gold hair matted with her own gore; wings, once revered for their beauty, now severed and ruined beside her; the smooth skin of her back split open and seeping—and I hesitated.
And when Marina gazed at her severed wings and sobbed, the sound so mournful, her ruined body trembled with it—I’d felt her sorrow in my bones.
There is never enough kindness, never enough good acts to make up for the atrocities she was privy to. She doesn’t talk about those years she lived with the Aeternalis, but I know she loved him. And she’ll never forgive herself for it.
“My brother knows.”
the island’s hold on her will become until it’s an eternal chain binding her to it, would be a betrayal to my kingdom.
Damning my people for a woman who I never even allowed to know the truth of me.
Is that so she can’t leave the island? Or so she can’t leave you? The question washes through me like ice water.
“I will be the one who trapped Willa, who stole her freedom and ruined her future. She won’t be able to leave the island but make no mistake…she will leave me.”
“Willa is a dangerously wounded creature. She won’t just leave me for the betrayal. She’ll kill me for it if she can,”
There’s something in Willa that’s drawn to you. I’ve seen the way she is with your death. After so many years of pain, you deserve something good, Niko, even if it’s fleeting—
But he hadn’t—not really. He’d only given me morsels, and because I was starving, I mistook them as enough.
To imprint the feel of this moment onto the surface of my heart.
“I would give you everything beautiful you’ve been denied, Willa.”
that it occurs to me he hadn’t spoken the words as a promise. He’d said them as a wish.
Whatever ominous reasons he has for wanting me to master my magic no longer matter. I’m doing it for myself.
Not when the thought of touching me disgusts him—not
“I didn’t create anything! My original abusers are dead, but there’s thousands more waiting in the shadows to take their place if they ever find out what I am—”
“And what exactly are you?”
He rears back in surprise, but I’ve already yanked the glove free. We both watch it flutter to the ground, as the world appears to slow around us, pulled tight by our tension. Hatred, desire, anger, intimacy. They’re all so blurred in the spaces between us, and they have been since the moment we met.
“No wonder Letum is dying. Aren’t kings supposed to be brave? And here you are, too spineless to even touch your skin to mine and take what you so clearly want. What you’ve wanted since the moment you met me.”
And I want to scream at the unfairness: that no one, not even the King of Death himself, is strong enough to withstand the black hole inside me. A fathomless chasm no one will ever be able to cross.
“I’d have to be pathetic to want you for anything more than opening my wards.”
Make him bleed like I do, every moment of every day, a seeping wound.
