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Then a strong hand wraps around my wrist, pulling me back over the railing.
His eyes are frenzied, flickering between my face and where his bare fingers are still wrapped tightly around my wrist.
Niko blinks suddenly, dropping my wrist like my skin has burned him. His palm spreads wide as he clutches it to his chest, stepping quickly away from me.
Niko gazes at me like he’s never seen me before, his body entirely still.
“Look, I’m sorry for touching you. I know you don’t like it, and it was wrong to—”
Niko grabs my hand for a second time, drawing me against his chest and crushing his lips against mine.
In Niko, I find the one thing I’ve always been denied.
I don’t know what Niko sees—a needy, sweaty, mess, probably—but his eyes deaden like a fire doused. He snaps his hand away from me and rakes it through his hair until the black strands stand on end. “Fuck,” he mutters furiously. And without another word, he spins on his heel and disappears through the door.
I’m exactly as pathetic as he said I was.
I’d have to be pathetic to want you.
“There was a reason your father sold you to those camps. It wasn’t just in exchange for your sister, was it?”
like alarm bells, and fear spikes over my skin. Familiar, like the honed edge of a blade. The innate sense to run.
He only lowers himself to kneel at my feet.
With slow intention, he wraps both of his hands around my thighs and gently pulls them apart, fitting his body more snugly between them. Kneeling as he would at an altar.
“I have been terrified to touch you.”
“But not for the reasons ...
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Niko bowed before me. He’s beautiful at my feet—dark
“I haven’t touched anyone since I killed the Aeternalis.”
“Two hundred and seven years, eight months and thirteen days. That’s how long it has been since I’ve felt the warmth of another, because it isn’t only my ribbons that are lethal.”
Because the truth is, it doesn’t matter that Niko’s touch is deadly. I can’t die.
shielding her growing attempts to take her own life from prying eyes.
It remains even now, two centuries later,
“I don’t mean today. You miscalculated by thinking you would ever be invisible to me. I have seen you since the moment I carried you from that beach, Willa.” I shiver at his dark words. “Every detail. Every color. I have studied too much of you for you to ever be able hide.”
should have collapsed on the beach right beside me as soon as you picked me up and touched your skin to mine.”
Furious heat tears through me, and that same place behind my heart, the one that froze time and then spun it back together, pulls taut. The place Niko has spoken of, where dreams and desires live and breed in the darkness, untethered by the expectations of the light. The place of my magic.
“I’m twenty-seven, give or take two centuries,” I amend. I’m rewarded for my honesty by the brush of his mouth, so gentle, I think I’ll come right out of my skin.
“Is that why you want me? To touch what you’ll never have? That’s rather twisted, Darling.”
Humiliation and anger spiral through me in equal measure. I try furiously to close my thighs, to brush away Niko’s touch and escape from beneath his scrutiny.
“Take however much of a taste you need, Willa,”
My brother has always been different.
yet gifted with none of his own, Dawson became a shrewd and ruthless manipulator to claw what power he could from those around him.
It makes me want to get on my knees before her, humbled in a way I rarely am as king.
Whatever awaits me at the Grove won’t be any more dangerous than whatever is growing between Willa and me.
“I have enough to worry about without having to make sure you haven’t walked straight into a trap. So do us all a favor and go back to being the woman who does nothing when the world burns.”
Every moment of comfort his power gifts is a moment of anxiety Sam must endure himself.
It’s the organized way they move. Like an infantry.
I don’t need to draw closer to see the unhinged madness lining his smile, nor the calculating determination in his eyes—eyes the color mine used to be, before I’d anchored myself to the island. A deep, clear blue.
Such a heavy thing, death. Weighted with sorrow and tragedy, with love and relief.
“Come back to me,” he whispers,
Her irises rage and churn, a cataclysm of unearthly origins. One that recognizes no humanity: no love, no friendship, no tenderness. Only power.
Her fingers clutch at his chest, holding on even as the world burns around them.
How must it feel to be wanted despite the deepest horrors you contain?
I don’t know whether to be furious, or to drop to my knees and weep.
There will be no unlearning the way she looks bathed in starlight, running toward the worst parts of me, instead of away from them.
“I found where my magic was hidden when you broke me open.”
killed the Aeternalis, sliced him through the belly with a sharp, metal hook and
“I told you I could help, you necrotic jackass.”
The King of Carrion doesn’t kneel before anyone, but for me, he’s been brought to his knees twice.
He grits his teeth and levels me with that onyx stare, but to my surprise, there’s no fury in it. There is only pain and self-loathing, and something oddly close to regret.
“I’m sorry, Niko,” I tell him softly, giving him the words I wish someone would have given me. I’m sorry for your pain. I’m sorry for the way you’ve torn yourself apart and given up all the pieces to everyone else. I see the holes. I know what they cost.
