There’ll be no more shame.
No more fear.
No more desperate yearning that wakes me at nights.
I’ll never see those blazing eyes lock upon me across a room again until everything around us fades.
“Just you and me, little wraith,” comes the whispered memory of his voice. “Forever.”
And any chance I ever had of escaping his hold over me vanishes.
Curse him.
Alaric doesn’t move. He’s barely even breathing.
The poison must be working through his system even faster than I could have imagined.
It spurs me to action.
“Don’t think you’re escaping me so easily,” I whisper as I slide to my knees beside the stone bier he’s lying on. “You still owe me a reckoning.”
Where the fuck are the healers? Surely they didn’t just leave him here to die?
It’s not as though they would have been able to do anything against the poison he ingested when he licked my lying little lips, but if he dies in Malechus’s court, there will be an accounting.
Two minutes left, at best.
I kneel by his side, and for some ridiculous reason my heart hammers in my chest.
I can’t help thinking of the way he kissed me that long-ago summer.
Every day I’d promised to kill him, and every day he’d simply laughed and said, “No, you won’t.”
And I hadn’t. I hadn’t been able to.
It’s the one time my knife has hesitated, the one time I’ve failed. It cost me more than he will ever know.
It cost me my heart.
My cruel, treacherous heart.
“Curse you,” I whisper as I run my tongue over my teeth, searching for the capped one. I break the tiny glass vial embedded there, and as the antidote floods my mouth, I lean down and kiss him.
Shoving my tongue into his mouth, I force the antidote within him. Tiny shards of glass cut my lips until I can taste my own blood. Taste his mouth. Taste him.
One single stolen kiss.
It reminds me of so many others. It reminds me of everything I forced myself to forget.
A hand suddenly sinks into my hair, and then I gasp as Mistmark wakes beneath me, sucking in a huge breath.
I jerk back, patting his cheek. He’s alive. I wasn’t too late.
But as his lashes flutter against his cheeks, I know I have to get out of here. He cannot discover I was here.
I barely escaped him last time.
A hand catches at mine as I turn to flee. “Sora?” His glazed eyes search for me.
He shouldn’t be able to sense me.
Once again, that fucking inexplicable bond between us has bound me in place.
“I thought… you tried… to kill me…?” His vision finally seems to focus upon my face.
My heart skips another beat as a thousand emotions wage war within me. “I did,” I whisper, and then, unable to help myself, I lower my face to his, stealing another kiss from his cold mouth.
One last desperate taste of him before I vanish.
He’s fading as I come up for air, his eyes rolling back in his head. The antidote will take several minutes to work its magic, and he’ll be weakened for weeks. It was the best I could come up with when Zemira first worked over this plan with me.
This poison is an inevitable death once ingested.
But the recovery is swift, and the consequences few.
As much as I want to kill him, I don’t actually want to hurt him.
He’s got you twisted in so many knots, you don’t even know yourself.
Cupping my palm over his eyes, I slowly close them. Maybe he’ll remember me. Maybe he won’t. But I can’t just leave without saying goodbye. “Sleep well, my lord.”
And then I steel myself and push to my feet, turning toward the doors.
Except I’m no longer alone.
“I wondered what you would do,” Falion says, leaning against them and watching me from beneath his silvery lashes.
Mistmark’s assassin.
The one I never knew about until it was too late.
I freeze in my tracks.
Of course. No wonder there were no healers. Only this faithful dog, waiting at his master’s heels to see how the game would play out.
I’ve never quite understood the bond between them.
“What I would do?” I lick away the blood. “Have you been watching me again?” I force a laugh. “The same way you watched me then? Tell me, Falion. Do you ever step out of the shadows? Or do you simply enjoy peeking through windows when nobody knows you’re there?”
There’s no sign I scored a point. He tugs one glove off as he steps forward into the light. “I enjoyed watching you stab Malechus. I was about to cut your throat myself, except you didn’t run for the exit, you made straight for this room. I’d smelled the poison on your breath and knew you had to have the antidote on you somewhere. You had to take it yourself, of course, before you could paint it across your lips….”
“Somewhat presumptuous.” I summon a small pouch of powder into my hands, curling my fingers around it even as I wave the point of my knife at him. Look at the knife, go on…. Just focus on the knife…. “I’ve been sipping miroire for years in order to acquire a certain immunity. It’s my favorite. The kiss of death…. Nobody ever sees it coming, and most males are too fucking stupid to look beyond what I’m offering them.”
“Not this one,” he whispers, and as our eyes meet, I know he’s about to repay everything I did to Mistmark that long ago summer.
I throw the pouch at him and he bats it aside, the spill of crushed bone and grave dust painting across his chest.
“You missed,” he says with a dangerous smile, before he vanishes.
“Did I?”
