Chapter 12

Chapter 12

E ven with Ksee’s words, Mariah knew she needed to sleep when she could. Somehow, despite the cold, despite everything, she fell into a fitful slumber, the mattress rock-solid but comforting beneath her shoulder blades.

A crawling along her skin pulled her from the clutches of consciousness, alerting her to the presence of another, standing in her cell and watching as she dozed.

Her body tensed, but she didn’t open her eyes. Instead, she opened her other senses—her smell, her hearing, the last dregs of supernatural power she could barely scratch with the shackles locked around her wrists. She couldn’t hear anything, but there was a scent in the air, something familiar and perfect and heartbreaking?—

With rain and sandalwood flooding her senses, she slowly lifted her eyelids, meeting a gaze of brilliant blue.

Andrian stood just inside her cell, the heavy door open, his posture rigid. His arms hung by his sides, but his hands were clutched into tight fists, the veins in his forearms as prominent as the whites of his knuckles.

A quip was on the tip of her tongue, ready to lash out at him, the pain from the previous evening still raw and heaving in her aching heart. But … something in his posture, in his expression, had her pausing, assessing, watching. Something about him was off, even more so than usual. It was as if he struggled with an invisible enemy, an internal war being waged inside his mind. Flashes of a battle sparked in his eyes, and his hair was messier and more tousled than usual.

It was so far from the emptiness he’d worn since that night in the courtyard. He was … changed. Mariah had endured enough to not feel hopeful, but she couldn’t help the prickles of curiosity against her skin.

After all, she’d resolved to make love her retribution.

“Is there something I can help you with?” Her voice was cold, dead, empty. Much like how she felt.

He jolted at her words as if surprised she was awake. His arms and shoulders tensed tighter, his head dipping to stare at his feet for just a moment before he lifted his eyes, boring into hers with bizarre curiosity.

Never in a thousand years could Mariah have guessed the next words that would leave his lips.

“Your eyes … they are very strange.”

Mariah stilled before pushing herself up into a sitting position. She swung her legs around so her feet were planted firmly on the cold door, letting the familiar chill ground her and offer comfort.

“My … eyes?” she repeated, words falling flat, but the question laced with confusion.

His gaze intensified, morphing into a burning violet-blue flame. “Yes. They look green, but there’s brown and gold and blue and gray there, too. All the colors of the forest.”

Her confusion warped brighter, sliding around her lungs and wrapping around her heart.

“It’s too dark in here for you to see my eyes.” She wasn’t in the mood for these games, for whatever he was trying to drag out of her. She’d been hurt enough. No more.

He didn’t answer despite her harsh tone. Just stared, expression confused and vacant, like a lost child who was far from home and didn’t know his way back.

She couldn’t let herself fall victim to that again, though.

“Is that all?” So cold. The temperature of the floors and the walls had become a part of her.

Another pause, another lapse without a response, as he watched her.

“What color are my eyes?” His question was even softer than the first, voice barely more than a hoarse whisper.

Mariah blinked. And blinked again. Her shock was eating at her. Strange feelings she hadn’t felt in so long burned at the back of her throat. She swallowed some of them down, pushing them past the lump forming in her chest before she played along. She met his stare, the rawness in his expression palpable and broken.

“Do you know what tanzanite is?”

His face twisted with slight confusion, as if searching his memories. Then he relaxed and nodded. “A stone. From the mountains. Bright blue with a touch of violet.”

Mariah nodded. “That’s what color your eyes are. Just like the stone from the mountains.

They stared at each other, the moment stretching past the point of comfort. It could have been minutes or hours that passed as they watched each other. He felt so different than he had the past weeks, so different than he’d felt before. It was as if he’d regressed in age, so it was no longer the thirty-one-year-old man she knew and had tragically fallen in love with but the boy he’d been decades ago. Before he’d been Marked with the symbol of her reign, before he’d left his family for Verith. Before his mother had died, leaving him feeling more alone than he ever had before.

Without warning, something snapped. The softness calcified back into icy stone. His eyes resumed their dark, wicked glint, stranger’s eyes that reveled in her decrepit state. He roved that foreign glare over her body before pulling his lips back into a sneer.

“You are disgusting. Pathetic. A disgrace. Just thought you needed a reminder.”

Mariah hardly heard his words as he spun on his heel and strode from her cell, the door slamming shut behind him. Her mind was caught in a maelstrom, thoughts spinning and swirling around each other as she relived their conversation, the strangeness of it. It all left her wondering.

Wondering if who he’d been just before he left, with his snide insults, was not the man she’d fallen in love with.

Wondering if maybe, just maybe, that man was still in there, just as trapped as she was. If his prison was one of flesh, while hers was of stone and steel.