AVEEN
I knewwhere I was without having to open my eyes. Rían’s cinnamon magic danced in the air, filling my lungs from my first unsteady breath. The soft silk of his sheets enveloped me in a delicate caress. My head no longer rested on unforgiving ground but a downy-soft pillow.
He’d brought me to his bed. In his room. In the castle.
Memories from the battle with the Queen came in flickers, candles on a moonless, windy night.
“She’s waking,” a familiar voice whispered.
My sister was alive. I should have felt happy. I should have felt joyful. Instead, I felt numb. As if I could see all those emotions fluttering inside a box made entirely of glass with no way to break inside.
“Don’t crowd her. Give her space.”Rían. I’d saved him from the Queen. The Queen was dead. Destroyed. Defeated. Neither relief nor elation followed the revelation. Two more emotions to fill that glass box.
When I opened my eyes and saw Ruairi grinning down at me from behind Tadhg, I should’ve been relieved that they’d been able to revive him after his fall on the battlefield.
So many warm feelings should have been coursing through my veins, but instead, I felt nothing at all.
The mattress dipped when Rían sank down next to me. He braced a hand behind my back, helping me sit upright and propping pillows against the headboard. So careful and attentive. So devilishly handsome.
And yet when his warm lips grazed my temple, my heart did not skip a beat.
It wasn’t until he laced our fingers together that I saw the blackness. The veins in my hands looked as if they’d been filled with ink. The markings stretched all the way to my elbows, like gloves made of black spiderwebs.
I’d killed the Queen with the cursed blade, and yet I was not dead.
I was not dead, and yet I did not feel alive.
“What am I?” I whispered, my scratchy voice harsh against the silken silence.
Rían’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean? You’re you.”
I pulled myself from his grip, turning my hands over and back again, but the color did not fade. “But I don’t feel like me.”
Tadhg’s hand slipped around the small of Keelynn’s back, and he drew her close. Red splotches covered her pale face, as if she’d been crying. The longer I stared, the more I noticed the toll this battle had taken on them all. Darkness ringed their eyes. Tension bracketed their smiling mouths and lined their worried eyes. Their happiness wasn’treal. This was all for show.
If I didn’t know any better, I would have said they looked scared.
Scared of what, though?
Rían’s eyes shuttered. “How do you feel?”
My father used to own an antique vase from a famous glass blower on the continent. I could never remember the artist’s name, but the way the oranges and yellows mixed and swirled was like looking at poetry. The fluted top had always reminded me of daffodils, the first flowers marking the end of a long Airren winter. They used to be my favorite, once upon a time. I couldn’t remember how old I was—seven, eight maybe—but I’d picked a whole handful of those bright, cheerful flowers the day they bloomed and carried them in my chubby fist all the way to the parlor where that vase sat on a shelf all on its own.
That had never made sense to me. Something so beautiful sitting up there, empty and collecting dust. That hadn’t been why the artist had created the vase. That hadn’t been its purpose. So I’d climbed on a footstool to take it down, fill it with water, and stuff those green stems into the top. I knew nothing of arrangement but did my best, spreading the trumpets so you could see them from every angle. And then I had placed that vase proudly on the center of the coffee table for all to see.
What’d my father do when he found it?
He’d snapped at me for touching something so valuable, carried it right out onto the patio, and dumped it out. Back on the shelf it went, empty and devoid of life, and to this day, that was where it remained.
Thatwas how I felt. Like that beautiful, empty vase.
“I feel hollow.”
Keelynn sucked in a breath. Tadhg and Ruairi no longer smiled false smiles but wore matching frowns.
Rían gathered my hair from my face, tucking the curls behind my ears. “Do you remember what happened?”
Did I remember? How could I forget? “I killed the Queen.”