by Frankie Rose
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Broken.
His arms were around me, his face buried in my stomach. He was shaking. He was alive. I clutched at Daniel’s shirt and stroked my hand through his hair with my heart hammering in my chest. I thought he would have pushed me away but he clung tighter instead.
“Daniel? Daniel…” Agatha’s stunned voice repeated. He didn’t respond. She stood up and went to the bed.
“Aldan’s dead,” she murmured. Daniel let out a low, strangled moan. I rocked him in my lap, stroking the back of his head while staring stupidly up at Agatha. The tiny woman’s shoulders were so hunched over she looked like she might topple forward under the weight of her sadness. She slid back down beside us to the floor.
“I knew he wouldn’t do it,” she whispered.
Daniel’s body writhed in my arms, and then he was pushing me away, trying to get to his feet. Agatha reached for his hand, trying to drag him back down. “Daniel, don’t!”
He looked down at her, numb, and shook his hand free. In a step he was at the bedside. His hands hung down by his sides. He looked much like the broken boy Aldan had told me about once before. I got to my feet. Unable to stop myself, I reached out to touch him on the shoulder. At the last second, I thought better of it.
Aldan lay still on the bed. His peaceful expression had a look of finality to it that pulled at my heart. Shame burnt at me. In those few moments—those unbearable moments when Daniel had been dead—I’d hated him. Nothing had ever consumed me so totally.
And now a sinking sensation filled me with dread as I looked down upon his body. What was going to happen now? The talisman was gone. It was hard to focus on that thought, though, seeing Daniel slumped forward onto the bed, propping himself up with his elbows. He stared at Aldan, shock devastating his face.
“He lied to me… he lied to me…”
I bit my lip. “What happened?” I whispered. He was quiet for a moment and then began to speak in hushed, exhausted tones.
“I came back here to get it over with. You nearly died today. Again. I couldn’t bear it. Aldan had to take back the power he had given me. He needed to end this nightmare once and for all. He promised me he would.” His voice cracked with emotion, and I stepped closer, running my hand gently across his shoulders.
Broken, I thought. But better broken than dead.
“I came down here. I went to him. He said he would take it, and then…” he paused, his eyes going wide. “He started to...to take it. I could feel it all slipping away. When I was too weak to do anything, he told me. Told me what he was going to do. I couldn’t stop him. He said that I could do more with it, that it wasn’t his anymore. He told me I had to live and keep you safe.” He swallowed hard and pushed himself away from the bed. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Agatha met my gaze and waved me off before I could say anything. “Don’t worry. Just go….”
I didn’t know what else to do, so I took Daniel’s hand, then paused in the hallway, not sure where he would want to go. The decision was made for me when he pulled me in the direction of my room. I followed after him, closing the door quietly behind us. When I turned to face him, he was staring blankly at all the books that he’d found for me, a million miles away.
I reached out, allowing my hand to rest on the top of his arm. As soon as I felt his warm skin under my fingertips I panicked and pulled my hand back. He turned and caught it in his own.
At any other time I would have been rejoicing inside but his grief was nothing to celebrate. He held onto my hand until his grip began to hurt, but I let him clutch hold of it, anyway. Something smashed down the hallway. I cringed, wondering if I should go and see how Agatha was.
“She must blame me,” he said emptily.
“She doesn’t blame you. How could she? She loves you so much. She’s just sad.” There was nothing else I could say to him. That terrible, wrecked look in his eye was overwhelming. “If anyone’s to blame, then it’s me. If it weren’t for me, all three of you would be somewhere far away. I forced your hand.” I lowered my eyes to the floor. The words I’d been too afraid to even voice inside my own head tumbled out in a rush. The pressure on my hand slackened.
“Farley…you’re so wrong.” Daniel slouched, searching for my eyes. “Aldan vowed a long time ago that he would never take another life, especially for his own benefit. I should have known he would never take mine. It’s not your fault that you were dragged into this. It was lucky Agatha and I realized who you were before they found you. At least now there’s a better chance of you coming through this alive.”
This side of him was alien. He had just lost the closest thing he’d ever had to a father, and he was trying to console me. I suddenly thought I was going to throw up.
“Are you okay?” I whispered. Of course he wasn’t. It was a stupid question; I knew that. But what else was I supposed to say?
He didn’t reply. He let go of my hand and stepped over to the bed, considering it briefly before collapsing onto it in a heap. His body twitched and trembled with pent-up energy but his face betrayed how exhausted he was. When he spoke, he crushed me all over again.
“Do you think you could just be here with me for a while?”
Words wouldn’t come. I could only nod. I climbed onto the bed to lie beside him. He closed his eyes and let out a pained sigh, rolling onto his side so we were facing each other. I studied the shattered expression on his face while he breathed deeply, trying to calm his body. Each spasm rolled into another, more violent one.
“Can I do anything?”
He shook his head without opening his eyes, reaching out with his hand to find mine. “There’s just so much…” His thumb traced light circles over the back of my hand. “So much... I can feel it inside me. There are hundreds…” He trailed off, his voice heavy. After a few minutes his body settled and the tremors lessened until they mercifully stopped altogether.
The grief slid from his face like a mask as he sank into unconsciousness. I lay there beside him, watching him dream, and it wasn’t long before I drifted, too. When I woke, he was sitting with his back against the wall, his legs pulled up, resting his elbows on his knees as he watched me. I sat up, embarrassed.
“Sorry.”
He looked down at his hands and smiled sadly. “What for?” His voice was a whisper.
I didn’t know where to start. For your brother. For that box they used to lock you in. For all the pain. For Aldan….
“There’s no point in being sorry for anything, Farley. You didn’t ask for any of this. I’m the one who’s sorry. I haven’t been very kind. There are reasons why…reasons why I’ve behaved the way I have toward you.” He looked awkward, impossibly shy. “I want to apologize.”
“Don’t even think about it,” I groaned. “I can’t bear you saying sorry for something so unimportant when Aldan has just died.”
“Unimportant?” Daniel whispered, studying his hands. “It’s not unimportant. It’s the most important thing there is. Or ever will be.”
I wasn’t really sure what he was talking about anymore, but the intensity in his eyes when he looked up made all of my thoughts disintegrate, scattered to the distant boundaries of my mind. It was all I could to stare back at him. I thought I knew what he meant, but it was too perilous to hope. Yet there it was, clear as day in his eyes. You are the most important thing there is. Or ever will be.
The silence between us was loaded with meaning. We studied one another, his jade eyes fixed on my steel ones. Usually it would have been confrontational to look at one another in such a way, but this was different. This look held everything we both needed to say and I wasn’t going to miss it. After a long moment, Daniel broke the silence.
“I have to go.”
Instant panic hit me. “What? When are you coming back?” He stared at me, and I knew. “We aren’t going to be together, are we?”
His face wilted, filled with sadness. “I’m so sorry, Farley.” He rais
ed a trembling hand and traced it softly down my mascara-stained cheek, causing my skin to smolder in a low burn. I closed my eyes tight. I wanted to capture the moment, to remember the heat that spread through my body.
“Why can’t you just say we’ll have all the time in the world to be together when this is all over?” I asked him. He brushed back the hair from my face as I sat there with my eyes closed, wishing that he would say those words. But he didn’t.
Instead, he pulled himself away from the wall to sit beside me on the edge of the bed. He tentatively reached out and slipped his arm around my waist, drawing me closer. The heat of his body pressed against mine, his warm breath on the back of my neck.
“Because I’m not coming back. I’ve got to kill them. The power it will take to destroy them is going to rip me apart, Farley. There’s no optimistic way to spin that.”
My eyes began to sting. “Then just don’t go. Stay here with Agatha and with me…”
“I can’t,” he whispered.
“Why?” I was too heartbroken to care about the tears streaming down my face.
He didn’t reply. He kissed me instead.
His forehead was an inch away from mine. He cupped my face lightly in his hands, and gravity seemed to draw us together like light towards a black hole. His breath was hot and sweet, mixing with mine as our bodies pressed closer. When our lips met, we melted together, a falling sensation so weightless and dramatic that I had to hold onto him to steady myself, and suddenly I couldn’t remember how to breathe. It wasn’t a kiss filled with joy or happiness. It was the saddest thing I’d ever felt, filled with a heavy longing and laced with grief. And yet, right then, it was perfect. He was perfect. It felt like coming home.
The moment continued, languorous, until the thumping of my heart couldn’t be contained anymore. I let it race away, each beat echoed by Daniel’s own, which I could feel hammering in the pressure of his fingertips. He gently drew my mouth open a fraction wider. His tongue found mine, causing my body to tremble and quake beneath him.
I reached up and took hold of his t-shirt, bunching it up into my fists, desperate to cling onto him and never let him go. He seemed to sense the change in my emotion and answered my feverish kiss with an intensity of his own, making the insides of my head implode under the tension.
He moved his hands to my waist and pulled me to him, somehow finding his way under my t-shirt. His hands rested lightly on the bare skin above my hipbones, making me shiver. I wrapped my hands around the back of his neck, feeling his heartbeat there, too, burying my fingers into his hair. He let out a low moan, his breathing turning ragged against my lips.
And suddenly he pulled back. My head swam, too affected by the tension of the moment to understand what had happened. I didn’t want to open my eyes. If I did, the moment would end. But for that second, his hands were still scalding hot against me. His breathing was still labored and thick. He was still so close.
His weight shifted on the bed. His lips were feather light this time, controlled, barely brushing mine. That little kiss seemed so sad and final, especially when he raised his lips to rest them softly against each one of my eyelids in turn…and then he was gone.
I had never felt so cold or alone as in that moment.
When I managed to force my eyes open, he was standing with his back to me in the doorway. His voice was nothing more than a whisper, filled with sorrow.
“It’s a beautiful dream, love. But some dreams just cost too much.”
He melted into the darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Your Highness
