“Will you stay with Julien, do you think?”
Viktor shook his head. “We’ve been together for so long it seems impossible that we could ever be separated, but the thought of spending another day with only him for company is unbearable. He’s so…empty, but not. So full of thoughts—his own and everyone else’s. All thought and no emotion. It’s like living with the shell of a human being, staring at half a painting, only hearing the left hand of a piano solo. I can’t do it anymore.” He dragged his fingers through his hair. “We’re this odd set of bookends. Julien feels nothing but I feel everything. The world’s pain, the world’s rage. Every bit of it seems amplified and magnified until it all comes bursting out of me like—” He threw his hand away as if something scalded him and down on the terrace far below us, a brazier suddenly ignited. Its flames shot skyward, lighting the night with a flash and flare of orange.
“And I’ve never known why,” he snarled, his hand now clenched. I could just make out a phantom trail of smoke escaping from the tight fist. “Do you know how terrifying it is to grow up with these things inside you—to be laid so open and exposed to it all, to know you’re different, to know that no one else feels what you feel, knows what you know—but to never know why? Or how? Or…” He dissolved into dark laughter. “Of course you do…and you don’t. You grew up completely different from anyone around you…but you didn’t know it and everyone else did.” His laughter grew. “Oh, Ver, we’re so much alike, you and I. So terribly, terribly alike.”
He reached out and cupped my chin, gently, as if holding on to something precious.
“You don’t love him.” It was said definitively, a statement decided, not an inquiry of doubt.
“I do,” I insisted, even as every fiber in me yearned to lean into Viktor’s caress, longed to reach out and touch him as well.
“Not like you could love me,” he said, brazenly rubbing his thumb across the swell of my cheek. “Not as I know I could love you. People like us—we burn brightly, Ver. We burn and we sparkle, like moonlight over your beloved waves. Alex is nothing. He’s earth and loom and soil and clay and he’ll smother you. He’ll cover that sparkle and squelch it out forever.”
“Fire never fares well with water either,” I reminded him, drawing up the resolve to turn from his grasp and failing miserably. I tried recalling the terrifying rumble from the dream—that awful booming noise that promised to herald in the end of the world—but here, in the glittering night, it seemed insignificant, a passing fantasy, nothing more.
“Did you know there are islands on the far side of the world created when fire and water meet?”
“No,” I admitted, clasping my hands together to keep them from reaching for him.
“You’d think the sea’s embrace would be the fire’s demise, but together they form something new and radiant. Steam and islands and life. Together they create an entire realm of their own. That could be us, Ver,” he murmured, bringing his face near, his lips just scant inches from my own. “Think of the worlds we could create, you and I.”
“Viktor, I—”
It began as a protest, I will forever swear that it did.
But then his mouth was on mine, or mine was on his, or they’d somehow moved at the same time, meeting each other, together and insistent. There was a groan. I couldn’t tell if it was his or mine, or if again, it was both of us.
The thought rang sharp and ill-pitched in my mind.
Us.
There was no us.
Even if my body screamed for his. Even as I wanted to draw him down on top of me, sprawled out beneath the glorious weight of him, a thousand stars watching on above us.
The stars…
The stars we would pull down…
The stars we would set spinning to our own tune…
There was most definitely no us.
“No,” I said, pulling away. “This isn’t right.”
“Keep on kissing me and I’ll show you how right it can be.” His voice was low and husky and I had a sudden jolt of desire to bite his lip, just to hear him moan.
“No,” I repeated firmly, for my benefit as much as his. “Viktor, stop.”
I turned my head to avoid his lips—his stunning, full, and ravenous lips—but he pressed them to my throat instead. I could feel my heart race against them, could feel a coil of heat in my belly, an ache that cried out to be filled. But still I pulled away.
He grasped at me, his fingers tangling into my hair, twisting me back toward him with single-minded persistence.
“I said stop!” I cried out, stumbling over my feet as I stood and backed away, eager to put as much distance between us as I could. I was no longer scared I would change my mind and succumb to his temptations. I was scared he wouldn’t listen to my refusal, no matter how loudly it was given. “Too volatile,” I reminded him. “Maybe Gerard was right.”
With a cry of frustration, he struck the bench, a bolt of lightning sizzling through space, and his hand left a scorch mark emblazoned across the pale marble. Again and again, he pummeled the seat, his hand glowing with an unnatural fury.
The plants around him began to wither, their magnificent leaves shriveling into dry husks in a matter of seconds. I could feel the heat building from where I was, hot and dangerous, a tinderbox showered in sparks, ready to ignite.
Julien’s warning rang in my mind, its echoes sending a chill through my core. Being careful wasn’t enough. I needed to get away, needed to go now.
“Good night, Viktor,” I said with finality, turning for the main door, off to the side of the garden. To hell with the secret passageways. I couldn’t imagine a worse place for me to be, with him like this now, focused on me with such indignant, seething rage.
“Ver, I didn’t mean—”
I slammed the door shut behind me before I could hear whatever hasty, panicked half-apology he was to offer.
“Keep your eyes closed,” Dauphine instructed, taking my hand and guiding me through the shop. I cringed as her fingers folded around mine and hoped she didn’t notice.
I’d been dressed in a room tucked in the back of the atelier, without a single mirror to aid me. Dauphine had wanted me positioned upon a little pedestaled tier in the front of the salon so that when I first saw myself in the completed wedding gown, I would experience it in its full wonder.
Part of me felt cheered as she went through such elaborate steps for the wedding—surely that must be a sign she was as in the dark as Alex believed her to be. If our union was only meant to be the next step in a series of mad experiments, why such fanfare? There were ways for Gerard to accomplish what he wanted without spending thousands of florettes on table settings and puff pastries.
Dauphine helped me onto the platform, holding my hands for balance. I moved slower than I normally would have, flinching at every sound I couldn’t determine an immediate cause for. Since racing away from Viktor last night, my imagination had run wild, concocting up terrible scenarios where Gerard would burst out of hiding from secret panels, carrying vials of unknown poisons and medical instruments, demanding a line of progeny.