As she drifted to sleep, a nagging thought percolated at the base of her skull. If she could be so forgiving of his well-intended meddling, didn’t she owe her mother a similar grace?
Another question nagged at her—one she feared the answer to even more as his words echoed in her chest.
You’ve been distracted by the king’s commander.
“Lux?” she whispered.
She felt him shift in the chair, tensing against the back.
She took a slow breath—he counted the seconds between the end of her exhale and the sound of her lips parting in the dark.
One.
Two.
Three.
Fo—
“I’m not the only one distracted… am I?”
Lux stayed silent for a long, brutal moment, at war with the right way to answer. She could feel it, pull together in a tightness between them—she damn near thought she could hear the thoughts spilling over his iron wall.
“As…” he said, unable to string together any of the dozens of words wandering from his mind.
Deep in the space between her beating heart and bleeding soul, she understood.
She wasn’t asleep long before she slipped further into herself, falling, falling, falling into nothing, just color and light blinding her.
“Go, go,” a woman’s voice screamed from above, her anguish a stab in the chest. The pain was unbearable. She couldn’t right herself, couldn’t see anything. It was like drowning without water, her lungs collapsed all the same.
Above her, everything exploded into a furious bright white. An unholy pain ripped through the air. She couldn’t tell if it was hers or someone else’s. Everything faded as her heavy eyes closed. The last thing she saw was a spray of ruby flames.
And then there was nothing.
She fought for breath, the pressure in her chest too much to take, her eyes starting to swell.
“As,” someone called from far away, their voice barely a whisper.
“Astra!” they yelled again, more firmly. Her lungs were on fire, begging for air.
A cold gasp tore her from the dream. Her eyes fluttered open, Lux hovered over her in Ehlaria’s guest room.
“Are you hurt? As, talk to me,” Lux pleaded, his knees on either side of her hips, eyes wide with the same fear she’d seen in the Midwood.
“I’m okay,” she breathed, her lungs finally filling again. “I’m okay.”
“You were dreaming about The Flare,” he said. “You were dreaming a memory. My memory.”
“Who called to you?” she asked, the woman’s terror still so fresh in her mind.
“I don’t know.”
It was the pain in his whisper that did it, she told herself, that broke her into a thousand pieces. The pain drew her in as she reached her hands to his face, drawing three curved lines along his cheek and his neck, where his hand caught her fingers.
“Go back to sleep,” he said, but he made no move away from her. His fingers wove between hers, pushing them against his chest.
“Will you ever let me in?” She held his gaze, hardly visible at the midnight hour.
