Page 118 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
“Perhaps she has been here whole time,” Barberro suggested. “It would be just like traitor to blame Her Majesty for Princess’sdisappearance, only to have kidnapped her and brought her here herself. The wretchedfyka.”
I assumedfykawasn’t the nicest word in the Sorronian vocabulary, but I didn’t ask what it meant. Had my mother really been locked away in the prison on Bascite Mountain for nearly five centuries before she escaped to meet Fabian and gave birth to me? Had she been caught again, lugged back like Jenia, chained up with the rest of the original Good Council? Or was she hiding somewhere in the depths of the jungle?
I shook my head. The jungle would have whispered to me about it if she was still here, hiding within its nest. And besides... “Lord Arad said my mother had come from thesea,” I said out loud. “She must have snuck through the dome somehow...” But how? And why? I glanced down at my sheath and whipped out the knife in a sudden flurry as a thought came to me. “Were you alive when the three sisters were still united?” I asked Barberro.
“Whoa there.” Barberro went cross-eyed in his attempt to track the knife. “I was boy, yes. Ten years of age when Princess disappeared. I lived near palace, but only saw her handful of times.”
So he wouldn’t have developed his power of Magnification by then. But maybe he’d still noticed little details. “Did you ever see Chrysanthia carrying this around?” I brandished the knife again.
Barberro zeroed in on the curved blade, as if pinpointing and memorizing the actual elemental disposition of it.
“I’m afraid not, girl with curly hair. Your mother always seemed to float around like feather back then—she would not have letthatweigh her down. But a lot can change in five hundred years, no?”
I supposed it could. And I supposed it didn’t matter why Chrysanthia had had a knife or how she’d slipped through Dyonisia’s dome all those years ago or what she’d been doing for those five hundred years of absence.
No, what mattered right now was whatIcould do with this new knowledge humming in my blood. Leave the island. Board the ship, where nobody would cut my head off with Old Veracious. Sail away and never look back.
Steeler stopped pacing to snag my gaze, as if he’d sensed exactly where my thoughts had flowed. Because he’d been there all along.
I lifted my chin at him. “What would you have me do?”
A slight cock of his head. A flare of his nostrils that was so miniscule, I might have missed it if I hadn’t memorized every piece of him. “What?”
“What would you have me do right now if you could have your way?” I repeated, and I could feel my eyes blazing, cutting holes through his own. “If you didn’t need anyone else’s input, would you leave me here or take me with you?”
I already knew my own answer, but I needed to hear his. Out loud. Right now.
“Would I take you with me?” Steeler repeated, uncrossing his arms and forging a step closer.
The absolute disbelief etched all over his features had me thinking that I was wrong. That I’d mistaken his intentions. That he wasn’t still in love with me as he’d claimed on the beach that day.
Then he came a step closer. The world shrunk into a cocoon around us, and the scent of his black bamboo filled my senses until I could feel his presence in every pore.
“Tell me the truth,” I whispered up at him. Even if he didn’t love me anymore, even if he didn’t want me to leave the island with him—well, for some reason, that would hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut, but I could handle it. I didn’t want anything less than undiluted honesty from this male ever again.
“Are you sure?” Steeler breathed down at me. “My answer isn’t very… nice.”
My heart dropped a fraction, but I nodded, my resolve tightening. “Don’t censor it. Tell me exactly what you’re thinking.”Don’t keep trying to protect me from the truth—whatever that may be.
“Fine, then.” Steeler’s face took on an open earnestness I’d never seen before. “If I could choose what to do with you right now, little hurricane, I wouldn’t just take you away from here. I would whisk you away to some remote corner of the universe, where I would keep you all to myself forever and ever and fuck you into a whimpering puddle, until every single worry in that beautiful mind of yours melted away and pleasure was the only sensation you ever felt again.That’swhat I would do right now if I could have my way.”
Oh.
My stomach thrashed with butterfly wings, and Steeler’s fangs wereso close, and my fingers were finally reaching up to touch them—
“We can go right now, yeah?” Barberro interrupted. “Then you can get own room on ship and I won’t have to watch? Or do you jungle people prefer the wild? If so, interesting concept, I will have to try it with—”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Steeler said.
Barberro stuck a finger in his ear. “I’m sorry? I don’t believe I heard you right. We just found out girl with curly hair is not traitor’s daughter and you said you’re…”
“Not going anywhere,” Steeler confirmed, taking a step away from me and shattering the trance that seemed to grip me. “Because whatIwant to do and what Rayna wants to do are two different things.”
I blinked. Reassessed my surroundings and wrenched in a sharp breath of air that scattered the wings in my belly.
For once, Steeler was right—though he must have dissected those creeping thoughts of mine before my subconscious could form them into clear shapes for me.
“I can’t go,” I said, turning to Barberro, if only so I wouldn’t get locked in a Steeler-induced trance again. “If Dyonisia is building an army… I can’t just leave my friends and family here.”
