Page 104 of To Dance with Death

He is afraid that I see him fully, the way no one else has.

Go to him one last time,Sundar said.

Hours have passed and the sky has dimmed, the aurora an array of purples and blues. Late evening, by the look of it, the soirées in full swing.

He has to return to his bedroom sooner or later.

It takes me far longer than it should to cross the bridge back to his wing of the palace. But as I near his room, a peculiar noise slows my steps. Almost like…talking.

Then I notice his doors are parted.

Warily, I approach, a sick feeling in my stomach. But before I can so much as peer inside, a form pushes through, the door nearly swinging into my face.

Then Dahlia is there, a wrapped sheet slanting across her figure.

It takes me a moment to realize what I am seeing, my eyes tracking each detail—her body nude as the day she was born beneath that sheet. Her cheeks are flushed, red as cherries, her tousled hair falling across her bare left breast.

Her smirk tilts upward when she notices me. “You had him for long enough. Time to share, dancer.”

It hits me, what I’ve just walked in on.

What I barely missed.

I feel very far from my body, even as I turn to run.

I don’t know where I am going, only that I cannotbreathe.

He slept with her, when last night he was promising me fidelity. The moon, even, if I had asked. But then I asked for his hand, and he rejected me.

Stars spin in trails across my vision. My shoulders slam into the wall next to the stairs, then I right myself, run harder. The pain is unbearable from the hours of exertion, the grief now making its way through my nerves; my body will soon give out. I welcome it, so long as I escape his wing. Crossing the bridge with fringed vision, I skip down the stairs until I emerge onto the pavilion that leads out toward the waterfall. The pool we swam in.

The pool.

I don’t think, don’t bother to shed my dress. I dive, desperate forany relief from the way my ribs beg to collapse and crush what’s left of my heart. I am desperate for solace, too—desperate to get away from the music of the soirées, the souls occasionally flitting by. I make it under the waterfall, pushing through the curtain of rushing water, and float in the quiet behind it, underneath the cave.

At least here, it’s as if the tears aren’t falling when water carries them away before they can land. The darkness, too, is a balm.

The pressure on my bones releases just enough for me to breathe again, except that in this moment, I don’t want to. I close my eyes, floating still, and yet all I can see is Dahlia at his door, grinning a triumphant grin.

I am trapped here. Trapped in Moranya’s Lair, in love with its ruler, and utterly unwanted. I ruined everything by proposing. He told me straight that he had no wish for attachments. But after all he said, I hoped…

I hoped. And perhaps that was the problem.

Suddenly, the relief of the pool is no longer comforting. I swim toward the rocks that lead into the cave itself, except I don’t seem to have the strength to pull myself out of the water, even as I try, straining with all my might. A defeated breath spills from my lips.

Then an arm comes around me, lifting me up—up alongside a hard, solid form. I yelp, gripping for purchase, but I realize it’s Anton, pulling us both from the water.

Carefully, he nudges me onto a soft slope of rock angled gently into the pool. He turns me so that my back is pressed against it—so that I’m forced to stare up at him.

He heaves breath overtop of me. Meanwhile I glare at him, anger congealing inside my chest, like the smoke of a catching flame. He forced me away from Miridran—ran from his people. Dragged me away, not bothering to talk to me. Not bothering, not bothering, notbothering.

He all but declined my proposal, as if I’d offered him a scrape of mud from my boot.

He rejected me.

He forced me here and left me alone to steep in my failure.

And yet he’s here, bracketing me with his arms. “Vasalie—”