Page 47 of Fate & Monsters
I sighed.
I cleaned his wound, letting the quiet wrap around us.
He winced under my touch. “You’re upset.”
“What makes you say that?” I scrubbed his blood away, and not gently. “Could it be because you vanished the morning after we… after last night, and returned bleeding from a wound dangerously close to your heart? Obviously attacked and lying to my face about it. How else am I intended to feel?”
“But I told you I’m fine,” the beast insisted.
“You are not fine,” I hissed. Perhaps I was speaking about myself, but anger was bleeding through me as profusely as his wound on the rug. “Injured and lying. I’m furious, Mavros.”
I dipped my fingers into the green salve the Inferni provided and began to spread it over the gash. He turned his face toward me, staring contemplatively. A flicker of remorse, and something else, darted through his burning gaze.
“I thought last night meant something—”
“It did,” he blurted, the arm on his uninjured side shooting out to grab my wrist. I faltered under the strength in his grip, still powerful despite his blood loss and the warmth of his touch. “Gods, it meanteverything, Astoria.”
“I don’t believe you when you’re pushing me away like this.”
“I’m not keeping things from you to save face. I’m trying to protect those I care about.” He pulled my blood-stained fingers to his face. Pressed his lips to the erratic pulse at my wrist.
I froze.
“You don’t have to worry about anything, Astoria,” he said. “Not with me.”
He cared, truly.
I sat there, kneeling on the blood-soaked rug beside him, and grounded myself in his presence.
Home, I had said.
In that fragile moment, I allowed myself to care. Even though it was too human. Even though it hurt.
Chapter 17
The wound should have killed him.
He knew it, and I knew it. The stench of virulent magic leaking from his shoulder all afternoon was proof enough. Whatever hurt him was tainted, meant to poison. We hadn’t spoken about it or how it almost took his life.
That damned injury that I pressed my own hands to, felt his blood gush through my fingers as I tried to help him. I couldn’t fall asleep without listening to his ragged breathing, as if each inhale were a struggle. I’d slept by his side on the library floor, feeling the pain shudder through him for hours and listening to the death rattle in his lungs despite his claim of being fine.
I hardly slept a wink that night, smelling the fetid rot on his fur as it tainted his blood and seeped through the bandages all night. That putrid, smell mixed with the herb-spice of the salve, had turned my stomach. Yet I remained at his side, tending to him. Even when he grumbled and complained like a spoiled child. As undignified asit was, there was something endearing about his behavior and the show of vulnerability. Mavros wanted me to be with him, but he didn’t want to ask. Almost as if it was assumed I would remain with him.
I did.
We hadn’t spoken about how the injury stopped bleeding by dawn. About how the next morning the foul scent of corruption in his blood vanished. No festering, no dark magic necrosis.
Not a word.
We ignored it as much as I’d ignored the dormant magic curling in my core, rousing like some ancient creature waking. Or the dreams I had. Nightmares of the red-clad wizard, chasing me with eyes like burning coals, panting noxious steam and slavering maw dripping with blood.
And I hadn’t brought up what attacked him again. If I did, I would feel guilt over my own secrets and the fact I hadn’t told him about being cursed and hunted. Saying it out loud made it real. That truth coiled up between us like a living thing, full of venom and hissing softly in the silence of our hidden truths.
A few days passed, and the weight of unspoken things grew too heavy to bear. Sharing his bed at night and finding comfort in his presence, in him being alive, didn’t suffocate the ache. I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I wrapped a silk robe around my shoulders asI left Mavros’s room. He’d jumped right back into his role as prince of the castle the morning after returning from the brink of death. If not for his unprecedented healing, he might still be fighting for his life. As if a new spark lit him from within, he spent sunup to sundown locked away, working on something he refused to speak about.
The halls were hushed, the sconces guttering low. I followed the familiar path to the library. I’d gone there almost every day since he offered to teach me to read. At first, I only went out of curiosity and because I was lonely. Then because I wanted to be near him.
