Page 105 of To Dance with Death

I shove at his bare chest. Again,again.I can’t stop. I’m so furious with him I’m dizzy with it. “You abandoned your people and then you abandoned me!” I resort to pounding, my fists balled—

He takes my wrists captive in a single hand, raises them above my head.Pinsthem there.

My gaze locks on his, my breath fuming. My hair leaks trails of water down my shoulders.

“You slept with her,” I heave.

“I slept with who?”

I huff, his play at ignorance all the more infuriating. “Dahlia. I saw her wrapped in your sheets, Anton.” Again I try to jerk my arms free and fail spectacularly, all for him to lean in, his voice a hiss.

“You think you have the right to be angry, yet you decided it wasn’t pertinent for me to know that you were in league with my brother. You danced on his stage for years. Fates, you were infatuated with him, and you never breathed aword.”

I can’t refute that. I can’t even explain. My lips are bound, sealed to the past, and yet—

“How—how did you even find out?” I manage.

He leans in, his jaw angled just above my mouth as if he mightbite.“Still no answers, then?”

My hands, fisted, clench harder, my inhales choppy as the storm-strewn sea. “You are one to talk, YourGloriousness.You would prefer to rot here rather than do what you know you ought. You desperately want to be loved, but you’re too much of a coward to look it in the eye! You reek of fear, and it’s such a pity.”

His stare is cold and blazing emerald like shards of severed sea glass.

Tears trail down my cheeks, my throat tight with them. “I love you,” I say, the sound anguished, “and you slept with her.”

“Vasalie,” he says again, his chest heaving. “Dahlia sought me out. I refused her.”

You had him for long enough. Time to share, dancer.

But he didn’t, he hadn’t…

And yet—

“You left me,” I continue. “You—yourejectedme.”

His lips hover atop mine. “And yet I’m here.”

My response tangles in my throat, the plethora of emotions stuck deep in my diaphragm impeding the air I’m desperately struggling to breathe.

“I don’t know what to do,” I pant. “With you. Withanything.”

“Be with me.”

I blink up at him. “What?”

“Be with me. Tonight.”

“But I…” My windpipe closes on a swallow. “I am so angry with you. I—”

“Tomorrow we will argue. About all of it. We will sort everything out. I promise you that.”

“But you said—”

“You,” he cuts in, “have driven me mad. Mad with all the ways I want to punish you,pleaseyou. You occupy every corner of my mind, every chamber of my heart, and I am tortured because of it. I have never wanted someone so much in my life.” Another breath, this one weighted. He touches his forehead to mine, a prayer on his lips. “Be with me, Vasalie. I need to make you understand what I feel for you.”

The tears have dried somewhat, and only now do I see him more clearly. He’s shaking, flushed. Disheveled, like a ship tossed about by a relentless storm. I’m shaking, too, though not from the cold. Here it’s irrevocably warm and humid, the both of us still heaving puffs of mist, our bodies soaking wet.

Yet there’s something different about him. About his eyes, the way he’s looking at me. Not recognition, exactly, but something…else.