A choked sound slips out of him, like his lungs forgot how to work.
He lifts a trembling hand as if to cup my cheek, leaving an inch of space separating us—the heat radiating off his palm akin to a ray of sunshine.
“H—” His stare blazes back and forth across my face, tracing the slopes of me with devastating precision. “H-how?”
Something about the way he rasps the word cuts me down the middle, like he’s stuffing those big, strong arms into my frosty depths, churning my lake into a storm of slush.
I open my mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a blow of frosty air.
Tension stiffens in the space between us.
The hand so close to cradling my face pulls back, crunching into a ball. He punches the wall behind my head with such force a hairline crack forms in the stone, weaving across my ceiling.
A litter of mildew rains upon us.
“How?” he bellows, and I growl, upper lip peeling back from canines aching to snap forward and sink into his flesh.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I snarl, wanting him out.
Gone.
Wanting the flame in his hand extinguished before it tills up any more of the hurt I’ve worked so hard to rid myself of.
“She speaks the truth,” comes a wobbly voice from the opposite cell. From the dark-haired Truthtune who only stopped crying eighty-nine ceiling drops earlier.
I thought she was asleep.
The male frowns, rips his cinder stare off me, and stabs it over his shoulder in her direction. “You a Truthtune?”
“I am. The female is confused by your interest. She is also petrified of—”
“That’s enough,” I snip, my words ricocheting off the walls.
The male turns his attention back on me, his all-consuming stare etched in so many shades of disbelief.
He crushes the flame in his large, calloused hand, though I have only a brief moment of reprieve before he pulls a metal weald from his pocket and flicks back the lid, revealing a bloodred bulb of Sabersythe flame.
My throat constricts, a strangled sound squeezing through the tightening space. A sound I want to crush from existence the moment it leaves my lips.
He raises his other hand, the rough tips of his fingers sweeping a tendril of hair from my forehead, leaving a wake of tingling flesh.
“Get your hand off me,” I seethe as he tucks the fall of inky locks behind my ear.
His chest boils with a sound that makes me picture the ground shaking, the tip of his finger tracing the jagged scar on my forehead. A scar that can be seen by dragonflame—the only substance in existence that can ignite a trail of long-ago runes and unearth their glowing ghosts.
“Your head,” he rasps. “You’ve been mended.”
Mended …
Such a funny word, signifying the end of something. But every hurt has an echo if you look deep enough.
A wound is never fully gone.
“Don’t remember getting that one.”
Not a lie.
His gaze dips. “Your eye. What happened?”
“Tripped on a stone.”
His head banks to the side. “Did it reach up and punch you in the face?”
I offer him a faux smile. “Strangest thing.”
A beat of silence before he continues, so smooth and soft it chills me to the bone. “Who are you protecting, Moonbeam?”
My frail, suffocating vengeance, flailing as it is.
Perhaps my skewed vision is making me see things, but he has a look about him. Like if I tell him who really punched me in the face, the kill will no longer be mine, and I’m holding on to that promise of hope until I’m masticated by a dragon’s maw or sliced from throat to navel.
“That’s not my name. And I don’t need you to fight my battles any more than I need your presence in this cell.”
He steals a single step back, snapping the lid shut on his weald, sealing the flame back into the runed metal vial. “Prove it.”
I frown. “Excuse me?”
“Turn around, lift your tunic, and show me your back. If a stone can cause such damage to your face, I’m very interested to see just what it’s done to pack this cell with the smell of so much blood.”
My heart plops into my gut. “I … No.”
“Always so stubborn,” he bites out, cradling the words like he fucking knows me.
He reaches forward—
Somebody sprints down the hall, cloaked in another white Runi robe akin to the one this male wears—an obvious ruse, given his weald and affinity with Ignos. Unless he’s multitalented, I guess.
The approaching Runi slows by my cell, peering into the shadowed depths. “Sire?” he whisper-hisses, the word pinching me. His eyes are wide with panic, stare bouncing between us both. “Guards are coming. Lots of them.”