His fingers crawled up my arm. I shivered, hoping he didn’t notice when he tugged me close and skimmed a knuckle over my too-warm cheek. “This fucking maddens me.”
“What does?”
“The feelings you wear all over your face,” he said, and tightly. “The arousal that colors your cheeks and glosses such dark eyes.”
I wasn’t sure how to do this anymore. Not now that I couldn’t fall into his touch and naively hope for more. Not now that I knew he didn’t want a wife.
He wanted a pawn.
When his fingers brushed my jaw, my eyes fluttered, and I looked up at him with too much hope for someone who’d already been made a fool by daring to rely on hope for survival. “Will I ever be free, Florian?”
His thick brows lowered.
As the riders and wagons began to fill the drive, I stepped closer and laid my hand over the black leather covering his chest. “Will you ever let me go?”
The wind whistled and threw my hair around my cheeks, Florian’s expression and jaw granite and his touch falling away. “Never, butterfly.”
I’d known what he would say. Perhaps that was why it didn’t hurt to hear it leave his luscious, lying mouth.
I nodded once, resolve building brick by brick inside me.
There weren’t many things I’d had the chance to excel at, but I was an expert at one thing.
Biding my time.
The king groaned a curse as I backed away to the steps, his nostrils flaring. Those depthless blue eyes lightened as they drifted down my body to settle upon my lower stomach. Loathing the way it quaked in response and how my thighs longed to squeeze together, I turned and strode up the steps.
“Tullia,” Florian called.
It was the name that made me stop, but I didn’t turn back as his alarmingly brittle order burrowed beneath my skin. “Do not leave the manor.”
A tear threatened to spill from my eye.
I had no unearthly idea what was wrong with me. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already know I was a captive—the enemy’s spawn—but his order to stay trapped indoors after I’d just reminded him of my lifelong dream for freedom was another small cut to the chest.
Zayla followed me from the foyer as I kept my head down and hurried for the false safety of my rooms.
Florian did not return to his rooms that night.
The following morning, over a breakfast I couldn’t stomach eating, Kreed informed me he was gone. He wouldn’t tell me where, and I didn’t ask. He did tell me that the manor staff and many of Hellebore’s warriors were busy with preparations for the looming Frost Festival.
But I had no desire to make the most out of the quiet grounds.
As per the king’s request, I stayed indoors and kept to my rooms. Not simply because he’d requested it, but because I was growing too uncomfortable to be anywhere else.
Night arrived with no return of the king. Days of increasing torture followed, and with them, no sign of Florian. After sleeping until midmorning on the third, I woke with a hunger I feared would be fleeting.
I tightened my robe to take Snow downstairs. Zayla had seemingly decided I was not in any state to attempt escape, for she was nowhere to be seen.
My bleary eyes snapped wide open when I caught his scent. It was fresh. We slowed on the steps as a voice I hadn’t heard for days looped around my body and tugged.
“I do not want her there,” Florian said from deep down below.
The door to his study must have been open.
Another voice followed. Fume, I noted, as we reached the landing before the last flight of stairs. “It’s part of the plan, Flor.”
Silence.
My hunger immediately abated.
Then Fume saying low, “Word spreads.”
“Then let that be enough.”
“But we both know it isn’t. Let it be seen and wholly believed. Molkan will hear of it before dawn can touch the sky.”
“The heat is upon her,” Florian said after a long pause, as if he hadn’t wanted to say it aloud. “Any creature can smell it should they get too close.”
Fume cursed. A moment later, he suggested, “Just keep her at your side, as you should regardless.” Carefully, he asked, “What are you to do about her evolvement, anyway?”
I assumed evolvement was a nicer term for what I was currently struggling to endure—the final stage of maturing into a faerie.
Typically, a full moon would prompt most young females of the age of twenty to evolve. A process that would grant us a heightened chance of finding a mate of the soul, and allow us to discover what our magical abilities might be, should we be blessed by the goddess with any.
And those of pure blood were almost always blessed with something.
I lowered to the bottom step above the landing, uncaring that either male could leave the study and scent where I sat—and know that I’d overheard them. Snow nudged at my hand with her damp nose, then laid her head upon my lap as she settled on the stone beside me.
When Florian finally responded, it was nearly too quiet for me to hear. “I wait until she asks for assistance.”
My heart both bloomed and shrank, the feeling painful and aggravating the dull ache in every limb.
“You would see her through it?” Fume cursed again. “But you’ve never done it before, Florian.”
Instant and intense relief shamed me at hearing that.
“That doesn’t mean I’m not aware of what it will require from me.”
My heart skipped and stalled in the stretched silence that followed. My bare toes curled over the dark whorls in the cream stone, my eternally flushed skin welcoming the touch of cold.
Fume’s voice rose. “And what about what you require? How will you possibly be able to—”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” Florian seethed. “You are not to talk of such matters, and you know it.”
A screech of chair legs over stone. “I need to visit the barracks. I’ll see you tonight.”
Florian gave no response.
The warrior friend must have taken another exit, for his steps in the hall faded in the opposite direction to where I was still seated on the grand staircase with Snow.
The word assistance stalked me for the remainder of the morning and haunted my fever dreams of skin and teeth and pleasure and feeding.
I woke sprawled sideways across the bed, midafternoon casting my bedchamber in an orange glow, as the mattress dipped behind me. “You have not eaten today.”
The first words the king had said to me in days.
I curled away from the tempting heat and energy emanating from him.
“Do you detest me and your circumstances so much that you would starve yourself?”
“I tried to eat,” I croaked, my eyes closing. “And yes,” I whispered. “I do detest you that much, but I would not give you the satisfaction of ending my life before it’s even begun.”
A touch of humor thickened his response. “You are not human, butterfly. Such a thing won’t kill you.” He paused as though thinking about that. “At least, not for many months.”
Irritated by his hypnotic voice and struggling to find the will not to roll into him and ask for him to assist me through this torment, I snapped, “Was there something you needed, Majesty?”
Though I wasn’t looking at him, I could sense he’d gone so very still.