Page 6 of Queen of the Wicked
“And you just let me wander into the courtyard unaware?”
“I didn’t think he’d come back!” I hiss.
“Come back? So he’s been here before? Is that why he knows me?”
I sigh. “He was here in the palace after I brought you back from the Blackwood. He had been watching everything between us through Cassius, his familiar. I made a vow with Cassius to protect you with our lives, and only after that bond formed did he reveal himself to me.” I turn to face her then. She’s trembling slightly.
The blue in her eyes that I’ve come to love so fiercely bleeds at the edges into something twisted and dark. She blinks, and it’s gone, but she seems…small. Her arms, already crossed, fold in tighter over her body and her chin tilts downward in shame.
I take a cautious step toward her, and then another, until my hands run up her arms and shoulders to cup her cheeks tenderly. My mind flashes to the way I held her before I snapped her neck, and it makes me soften my touch.
“You’ve carried a burden in your eyes ever since you clawed your way back from death. Do not let the vile of Rowan Sokolov be another. I think I’m enough of one, don’t you?”
She takes a deep breath and rests her forehead against mine. “The man I died for could never be a burden,” she whispers. Then, she wraps her arms around me and rests her cheek to my chest. “But what burdens me is not your decision to make.”
“I’m just trying to protect you, my love.”
“From Rowan?”
“From everything.”
She pulls back slightly. “That doesn’t sound like protection. It sounds like you are trying to control me.”
Her words are slick with venom, despite the fact that she embraces me with the strength of her new half-mortal muscles. I can feel those trembling, blackened fingers twist into my coat like she’s barely holding herself back.
She has always been stubborn, proud, and defiant. But this? This is not her. She looks at me, and I can see that she doesn’t even realize her voice is dripping in razors. It’s in her scarred spine. It’s in her soft breath.
“You’re cold, my sweet Adelasia. Hardened.”
Her eyes narrow, but her voice is calm. “Do you think I should still be soft after everything?”
“No, but you say that as if softness is an insult. It has always been a beautiful strength in you.”
“So who I am now is no longer good enough for you?”
“That’s not what I said.”
She scoffs quietly. “But when have your words ever said what you truly meant?”
“Adelasia, I do not want to fight with you. I simply want to understand what you have become. You’re not yourself. You know this.”
She steps back from my embrace. “Perhaps I’ve become who I was always meant to be.”
I flinch. I can see it in the way she looks at me–the crack between us is as obvious as the broken hallways of the palace.
She’s drifting, and I don’t know how to fix it.
I don’t know how to save her. Or if she even wants to be saved. But here I am, clutching to the memory of the girl who begged me to kill her to save us.
What if I didn’t save us at all, and simply pushed her into the arms of something she now desires more than me?
I’ve been clinging to this idea that my love could anchor us, and that with her by my side in her new immortal life, that this curse of vampirism would no longer be a curse at all, but a chance to love her forever. That she would be safe and I would never have to worry about losing her again.
But it’s already happening. Slowly. Quietly. With colder words and darker eyes.
And maybe she doesn’t believe she can be saved from what’s happening to her, but I do. I need to believe that when she pulled herself back from the grave, she didn’t come back to me just to become a shell of the woman I fell in love with.
The silence between us is thick, but I can’t let her walk away from this conversation believing that I love her any less. So I simply close the space between us, close my eyes and press a kiss to her forehead.
