“Will you please come back?” she whispered. A shiver tore through her, though she tried to hide it, clenching her teeth and straining her shoulders.
I told myself she’d been through enough tonight. Drinking. Torture. A dalliance with death.
I told myself she was healing.
She was exhausted. Had shared a fight with her sister. Had set eyes on Perpetuum and walked away.
I told myself it was too big of a decision to ask her to make in one moment. That she needed distance. A chance to choose on her own, without me watching her.
I told myself that every bit of disappointment hooking its barbs into my heart was selfish. I buried them under that riverbed of envy, deep enough I hoped not to find them again. Left them layered under muck and water and the promise that time would make me forget. Then I climbed back in beside her, lifting my arm so she could curl under it, and tucked her in close. But not so close enough to see through the armor of my smile.
Too soon from now, Thaan would knock. I’d slip away, tucking my tail between my legs and returning to another decade of mountain dust strung with gold veins. But tonight…
Her hair smelled of waterlilies as I dropped a kiss onto her forehead. Smooth, clean, citrusy.
“Sleep, heiress,” I said.
Selena stared at the hollow of my throat. The candle whispered, flickering as though a draft floated through the room. I watched the shadows dance under her cheekbones. She swallowed, deep in thought, though she didn’t say a word. Every few minutes, her fingers roamed in place against my chest.
She lasted longer than I would have guessed. Eventually, she closed her eyes and didn’t open them.
I know because I waited for what felt like hours. Just in case they did.
43
Selena
“Our mother isn’t coming, is she?”
Thaan didn’t even answer Cebrinne.
She asked with such cool surety. She’d always hated him. Almost as soon as she’d laid eyes on him, she hadn’t trusted him.
“Get them in the water.”
Deimos took Cebrinne.
The Naiad standing closest took me.
I fought him as we fell. As we hit. As we sank into the dark.
But somewhere under the waves, I realized I knew this Naiad.
I knew the silhouette of his shoulders. The outline of his cheeks. The soft steel in his eyes.
He traced the arch under my chin, tugging my face up. His gaze dropped to my lips, and I watched as his mouth opened in response, transfixed by what he saw. He leaned in, his thumb drifting to the opposite side of my jaw.
Our lips met. The barest whisper of a touch.
And then he was torn away.
My eyes flew open as some part of my mind registered the sound of four heartbeats in a tiny servant’s room below a palace.
I clawed across the bed at him as we ruptured apart. Some fraction of me was still underwater, weightless, my arms and legs buoyant. Dry air choked my lungs, the thin blanket tangled between my legs.
On the floor, Pheolix twisted to look at the Naiad standing over him. Deimos held him down, though he was struggling. Pheolix had locked an arm around Deimos’s leg, tripping him sideways, sending him to the floor as well. I scrambled to the edge of the bed.
A hand wrapped around my throat.
