Grim stared down at her. The corner of his lips twitched in amusement. “It’s a deal, Hearteater,” he said. He held out his hand, and she took it. They shook on it. By the third shake, he had portaled them back to her room.
He didn’t drop her hand. She didn’t drop his.
Isla swallowed, and his gaze traveled down her throat. Lower. Lower. She took a step back, and her spine hit the wall. He stepped forward.
Grim had told her more about himself than ever, the last time she saw him. He’d let her look beneath the mask of death and darkness. Underneath . . . there was a man. Someone who had been through pain.
Someone she had started to understand.
Their gazes were locked. Isla had the sense that the room could come crashing down around them and they still wouldn’t break eye contact. Grim stepped and stepped, until he was right in front of her. She had to crane her neck to watch him.
He leaned down. He dipped his head slowly, tentatively. He was the greatest warrior in all the realms, but Isla could have sworn he was trembling. She felt his breath against her face. His breathing was labored.
“Please,” he said, sounding pained. “Please, tell me you want this.” He waited for her to nod. He traced her body with his eyes and said, “I know if I touch you again it will kill me . . . but I think I might die if I don’t.”
She didn’t dare move as he gathered her in his arms and ducked to meet her.
An inch from her lips he stopped. Cursed.
She straightened. “What is it?”
“There’s been a breach in the scar,” he said.
Then he vanished.
GONE
When Isla awoke that morning, she startled out of bed. Oro was next to her in a moment. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Not wrong,” she said, frowning. “Just . . . a development. The Wildling healing flower, the rare one?”
He nodded.
“It’s nightbane.” She said it like it was the biggest news in the world, but Oro just looked at her.
“What’s nightbane, love?” he asked.
Oh. She sometimes forgot that he wasn’t in her head. There was an entire life she was currently living internally that he didn’t know about.
She closed her eyes. Breathed. “Nightshade has fields of the Wildling flower.” Isla didn’t know what to do with this information; she just knew it was important. “I—”
Suddenly, her head was pounding. She bent over and felt Oro race to her side. She blinked, but she wasn’t seeing in front of her.
No. She was seeing a forest.
She knew that forest. It was right outside Wren’s village. There was a pull in her chest, a desperation, a call.
Lynx.
Somehow, she was seeing what he was seeing right at this moment.
Just as she wondered about the connection between bonded, she saw him.
Grim.
He was in the Wildling village. No. Fear gripped her chest.
Lynx leaped forward. He raced through the trees, to the village. Before he could reach any of the villagers, though, the vision vanished.
“I need to go to the Wildling newland,” Isla said, her voice just a rasp, her hands shaking.
“I’ll come with you.”
She portaled her and Oro to the village, the same way she had done almost every day for weeks.
Silence.
Isla portaled to another, smaller village, which had been filled with singing and laughter and the snap of weaving with wood and vines the last time she visited.
It was empty.
She went to another. Empty.
Every house was vacant. Crops that should have already been collected that day remained untouched.
She portaled back to the outskirts of Wren’s village, where the small patch of deep-purple flowers had been planted and extracted. It was where she and Enya had just finished cataloguing it all.
The healing elixirs that they had spent weeks producing were gone.
Gone.
“Isla,” Oro said, putting a hand on her arm. Lynx broke through the brush. His eyes were wide, angry.
No.
She’d finally faced her people, gotten to know them—
And they were gone.
It was in her room in the Wildling palace that she finally found a note. Its seal was as black as melted-down night sky, and bile rose up her throat. It confirmed what Lynx had shown her.
I’ve brought them to Nightshade, it said. They’re waiting for you, heart. We’re all waiting for you.
A chill dropped through her stomach. Darkness bloomed.
The paper disintegrated in her hands, blowing away in a few pieces of ash, and she raged. The stone in her room rippled with her anger. Her wooden door flew off its hinges, collapsing against the opposite wall. The spot beneath her was tinged with darkness.
Lynx made an angry sound as Isla broke down completely in front of Oro, sobbing into his chest. “He took them,” she said. “They’re gone. They’re all gone.”
BEFORE
Grim was gone. One moment, he was there, so close to her, and the next, she was alone. There had been a breach in the scar, he said.
How did he know? Could he feel it?
It had been hours since he had vanished, and she began to worry.
A part of her, a whisper in her mind like a shot of ink tainting all other thoughts, imagined the worst. It spun possibilities. What if the dreks had defeated him? What if he was stuck on the battlefield, slowly being consumed by the darkness that only her elixir seemed able to heal quickly?
What if he needed her?
She told herself she was worried because if he died, he couldn’t help her at the Centennial. Only for that reason.
Night bled into early morning, and Isla decided she couldn’t sit in her room and wait. She had to do something.
She was wearing one of her nightdresses. Isla considered changing, then forgot it. Grim could be dying. He could be in his room, bleeding out, not able to portal to her . . .
She portaled in secret to Poppy’s room to steal more serum and drew her puddle of stars.
Isla had been waiting in his room for half an hour, sitting perched on the edge of his bed, when he finally entered.
Relief filled her, then rushed away.
He looked like a demon.
Grim wore a helmet with spikes that curved down over his nose, his temples. His shoulders had barbs like blades. Touching him anywhere would draw blood. His armor resembled dozens of scales, plated together. He looked like a creature of the night, a monster in the dark. Shadows puddled at his feet, circling.
Isla didn’t dare breathe. She told herself she should be afraid. If she had met him like this for the first time, she might have been.
But when the demon shed his layers, there was a man beneath. His helmet cracked against the floor when he dropped it. He stripped the armor off, with the tiredness of someone who felt suffocated, who wished to be free.
His shirt beneath was black and tight, fabric wrapped around and around. Isla didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed her yet.
All she could do was sit in shocked silence as he took off his shirt. Only when the fabric was over his head did his back tense.
And he slowly turned around to face her.
Isla felt her face go scarlet. He was unharmed. She felt foolish. Of course he was unharmed. Last time must have just been a fluke. He was the ruler of Nightshade; he knew how to defend himself. He didn’t need her, of all people, looking after him.
Stupid. She felt her face heat. She stood from his bed—why had she decided to sit there?—and smoothed her hands down her silk dress. Grim’s gaze dropped. She felt it like a flame, heating her from her collarbones, down her chest, her stomach, to places that made her dress suddenly feel too thin. “I—I just wanted to make sure you were fine,” she got out.