The shards disappeared, and I realized mere moments into my existence what it meant to be trapped.
“Answer me, Raeve.”
Again, I feel trapped. Forced to look at something I’m certain has the potential to shred me from the inside out if I look any deeper.
Any harder.
Because those shards I saw when I first opened my eyes to the world … I now understand they were scavenged at the same time as me. That’s why the cart was lugging them past my cell. They’d just been snatched from the snow, dragged inside a mountain of stone and ice that held a belly full of fire.
“Are. You. Familiar with it?”
I leave the stripped memory where it belongs.
Within.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I snip, whirling around, storming toward the exit.
Kaan banks, cutting me off, his leather tunic dusted in a fine layer of frost.
My gaze snaps up to meet his fiery glare that’s so at odds with the icy fractals dusting his hair and beard, making it glimmer in the luminous light. “Move.”
“See, I think you’re lying.” He pushes forward a step, emitting the immense energy of a mountain-size beast in his prime. An energy impossible to ignore. “I think you know this moon better than anyone else.”
There’s a rumbling within me, from somewhere deep beneath my lake. A hum of acknowledgment I neglect, focusing instead on the anger swelling within my chest like a ball of dragonflame.
My foot slides back, upper lip lifting from my canines.
“I think this beast cradled you for a hundred phases, breathing life back into your broken body until you both fell from the sky. I think you broke from Slátra’s tombstone like a hatching dragon—”
“You’re fucking mad,” I hiss as my back collides with the moon.
“Am I?” He arches over me like a rocky overhang, leveling me with a look that sucks all the oxygen from my lungs. “Because I knew a female who died. Tragically. Whose lifeless body was sailed into the sky by the adoring beast at your back with my torn-out heart in her fucking fist,” he rasps, lifting his hand into a claw that he shakes in my face. “Her name was Elluin, and she laughed with the wind, cried with the rain. She angered with fire and bellowed with the ground. Her heart thumped in synchrony with—”
“Enough.”
He growls, and there’s a clicking sound. He says a word I don’t hear over my roaring pulse as a flame dances to life in his hand.
My body stills, paralyzed by the sizzling sight. A deeper, almost sentient silence hollows the cavern surrounding us. A silence that seems to spawn from … within.
Me.
Like I’m sponging the sound. Absorbing it.
Kaan brings that flame so close to my face I’m certain he’s about to smear it across my skin, and I become innately conscious of the fact that something inside me is watching.
Listening.
“You look me in the eye, Moonbeam—right in the soul—and tell me you don’t hear this fire’s hissing shrieks. Look me in the eye, sharpen those words, and don’t fucking blink as you plunge them through my heart.”
I struggle to gather the breath to tell him exactly that. That his flame does not shriek or hiss or spit. It is but a flame, and it does one thing.
It burns.
“Crush your flame, Sire. Or I’ll crush you,” I seethe with cutthroat certainty—violently aware that my Other is on the brink of bursting free. I may be utterly against hurting this male, but I cannot speak for … it. “That’s a promise.”
A line forms between his frosty brows.
He whips his hand away, crushing it into a fist of smoke, flooding my system with a cold deluge of relief. “Who hurt you?”
“I do not hurt, King Burn. I harden. And no—your pet flame did not sing to me. Not even a little bit. Otherwise I would’ve sung it up the hall and ordered it to suicide itself in a puddle.”
His frown deepens, his hand coming up as if to cup my cheek. Like he wants to touch me but is worried I might slice it off. “Don’t lie to me, Moonbeam. Lie to the world, but please don’t lie to me.”
“Stop talking to me like you know me. You don’t. Even if I did fall with your precious moon, I owe you nothing. Elluin is dead.”
“Stop.”
His word commands. His eyes plead.
Both ricochet off my armor like arrows I snatch, lodging them between his ribs. “Saving my life, dragging me away to your big, bright kingdom where everybody fucking loves you is not going to reincarnate her. I’m not yours, and I never will be.”