“You kill your own monsters.” A rueful smile picked up the corner of Solmir’s mouth.
She dropped the carving into her coat pocket. And when she wound her fingers in his hair and pulled him back to her, he didn’t protest.
They were still kissing, slow and languid and not leading to anything else, when she heard the chuckle.
There was no illusionary King to watch them, since Neve wasn’t there for Valchior to lay his hand on her forehead and spin a lie of the man he used to be. But apparently the Kings could still see them, even without that. Their awareness seeped into every bone of their Sanctum.
“Don’t worry, Shadow Queen.” The voice reverberated in the floor, in her ears. “We didn’t watch.”
Solmir snarled, fingers arching like claws. “Fuck you,” he whispered hoarsely into empty air.
The chuckles intensified.
Neve lay her hand on Solmir’s cheek, turned his wide, scared eyes to hers. She was beyond shame now. Who cared if monsters knew she was a dark thing made all of want? “I know you told me not to say it,” she began.
“Don’t,” he murmured, and kissed her instead, swallowing the confession.
They turned to the opening in the rib cage together, the arch of bones that served as an entrance. The long chain on Solmir’s wrist snapped off, fell in a cloud of dust. The Kings, releasing him with a thought.
Hand in hand, Neve and Solmir wound their way through the bones, pulled back to the center of the Sanctum like planets on the curve of their orbit.
The Kings sat on their thrones. The Dragon’s skull glared down from the apex of the ceiling, immense mouth eternally open in an endless, silent scream. Neve strode to the center of their circle with her jaw firm and her eyes narrowed, graceful, regal. Her hand trembled in Solmir’s, but she didn’t let the fear show on her face.
Solmir’s expression was a mask to cover terror. A sneer, blue eyes cutting, lips twisted like he wanted to rip each stone effigy limb from limb.
“Well.” It took Neve a moment to place the voice—Malchrosite, the most reserved of the four. “Did you have time to say goodbye?”
“Oh, she did.” Byriand tittered, a strange sound in these voices of shale and stone. “She said a thorough goodbye.”
Valchior said nothing. The King faced her, rock-still, face shrouded by gauze and stone fingers steepled. Waiting.
Damn him. He wasn’t going to ask. He was going to make them say it.
“I’m through running,” Solmir said, low and seething. “I’ll be your damn vessel. But you have to let her go.”
A moment of quiet, the calm before a thundercrack. Then a low laugh, coming from everywhere at once.
“Well, Valchior, you did your best.” Calryes’s voice was somehow mocking, even layered in rock. “But it seems we’ll be stuck with a second-rate vessel after all. You always were a disappointment, son. Running for centuries, only to end up right back where you started. You tried so hard not to be a villain, and look at you now.”
“He’s better than you,” Neve snarled. “Better than you could ever hope to be.”
“I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?” Calryes was incapable of expression, and the shroud draped over him hid where his face should be. But it sounded to Neve like he grinned.
A frisson of disquiet curled in her middle, a splinter of doubt.
The King in front of them shifted with the squeal of rubbing rock. Valchior leaned down, the spikes of his awful crown glinting. Solmir stepped between them, like he could block the King, but Neve laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“Wait,” she murmured. The magic in her center swirled and writhed.
He didn’t want to. She could see it in the thin line of his mouth, the terrified glitter of his blue eyes. But when Neve stepped around him, toward that waiting stone finger, Solmir didn’t stop her.
The stone finger touched her forehead, alchemized to flesh. She opened her eyes, and she and Valchior stood alone in the Sanctum, an illusion of privacy.
The King didn’t take his hand from her once the illusion was complete. Instead, he slid it from her brow to her cheek, cupping her face, a worried light in his eyes.
“I will speak plainly,” he said. “You are making a mistake, Neverah.”
Her brows knit. The uneasy curl in her stomach coiled all the way up her spine.
“You want to think there is good in him,” Valchior murmured. “I don’t fault you for it—we want to think the best of those we care for. Even when there is no proof of it.”