No purpose except to steal my breath and fill my soul with awe and wonder.

“It’s the aurora,” he says, and I hear a faint clicking as he shuts the door to the staircase behind us. “It was my sister’s favorite thing in the entire world.”

Was. Past tense. Just the way Gunter spoke of her. The gravity of that single word punctuates my elation, this dreamlike state the sky has swept me up in.

“How could her favorite be anything else?” I ask, my breath fogging in the cold as I stare up at the sky. As I watch my breath swirl in smoky tendrils, I realize it’s the first fresh air I’ve tasted in weeks, and all of a sudden, it’s like I can’t breathe fast enough to make up for the lost time. My chest spasms, in and out, in and out, like I’m a parched runner on the brink of death, gulping from an oasis in the middle of the desert.

I can’t get enough, I can’t get enough, and the air that fills my lungs isn’t enough either, I can’t…

“Blaise.” Gentle hands cup mine as Nox wraps his arms around me from behind.

My next words come out like a sob. “I can’t breathe. There’s all this air and I can’t breathe.”

“Hey,” he whispers, and then he’s pulling my hands upward, one to my chest, the other to my navel. “Do you feel that?”

A tremble rocks through me, and this time it has nothing to do with Nox’s touch. I don’t know what he’s talking about, because I can’t feel anything except for the way my lungs are collapsing, withering as they reject the air that my body is no longer capable of using.

“Right here,” he says, thrumming his thumb across the hand that rests on my belly, “And here too,” as he strokes the hand against my chest.

And then I feel it, the steady in and out.

“You’re breathing. You’re breathing, Blaise.”

Tears flood my eyes, and when my knees give out in relief, Nox doesn’t let me fall. Instead, he lowers us both down to the ground and pulls me into his lap, rocking me gently like my father used to do when I woke from a night terror and I’d crawl into bed with him.

When enough time has passed that I haven’t dropped dead and I’m convinced the air isn’t poisoned, I give myself permission to use some of the air to speak. “I didn’t realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen the sun,” I say, half-laughing, half-choking. Nox goes still, and I realize my folly soon enough. “I guess I still haven’t seen the sun, have I? But the sky. I didn’t realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen the sky.”

When he still says nothing, mortification at my come-apart overtakes me, and I free myself from his grip, turning to face him as I sit myself on the stone veranda across from him.

I was wrong before, about never seeing color before. Because it’s there—the blue in Nox’s eyes, pale as it may be. He watches me like he’s afraid I might disintegrate any moment now, like if he takes his eyes off me, I might hurl myself off the top of this tower.

It shouldn’t, but the concern with which he looks at me fills some gaping hole inside me.

It’s not that I don’t know what it is to be loved.

Evander loved me, loves me still, despite our relationship being complicated. My father loved me, too, and even Ellie.

I’ve known what it is to be loved, and loved abundantly, but this is new.

This is not what it is to be loved.

This is what it is to be seen.

I hadn’t realized until now how much I ached for that.

Because flickering behind those blue eyes of his, I don’t detect a misled infatuation with a girl whose blitheness is intoxicating.

All I see is a male swathed in darkness who searches my eyes and finds a mirror.

Because when Nox looks at me, he sees my pain, and he does not look away.

“Theo. Rose,” I find myself saying, and he cranes his head at me in question.

“You asked me earlier about the darkness. Where it came from. I was afraid to tell you…afraid…” I bite my lip, grasping for the right words. “It’s not even that I’m afraid of your judgment. Of you seeing me differently. It’s just that for the past six years, I’ve kept this secret inside me wound so tightly; it’s like if I unravel it, the rest of me will come undone too.”

Nox doesn’t argue with me. He doesn’t try to convince me I won’t come undone.

He just nods, and it’s such a gentle nudge, but it turns out it’s all I need.

So I tell him. I tell him of Theo and Rose, of Derek and the kitchen pantry. He winces when I get to the part about Derek cutting my hair, and I know he’s remembering how I reacted when he took a lock of my hair for the failed potion, but he says nothing. He just listens and watches and witnesses the unraveling, and I suppose that’s all I ever needed.

I tell him of the dozens of faces I’ve seen on my child, the hundreds of dimpled smiles. I tell him that Rose paints and Theo loves to hunt, but finds himself drawn to poetry in the quiet moments. I tell him all the lies I tell myself, and he takes them as truths. I tell him what a master I am at pretending, and he doesn’t look at me like I’m a child, and I silently thank him for it.

And then I tell him the grandest secret of all, though I won’t be fooled into thinking that he hasn’t figured it out already.

“The pain never goes away. It’s always there,” I say.

“I know,” he says, and I know that, too.

He reaches across the cold stone and winds his fingers through mine. The gentle breeze flutters at the hem of my coat—his coat, which he slipped over my shoulders as I lay my secrets bare before him.

“What would you do if you were to meet Theo or Rose?” he asks. I can’t explain why, but the sound of their names on his lips has me wanting to crumple in his arms. Perhaps it’s the dignity, the affirmation he gives my sick little soul by taking the names seriously.

“That depends,” I say, allowing the warmth to wash over me as Nox plays with my hands. “It depends on what the parents are like.”

Nox furrows his brow, and there’s something like glacial rage in his expression. “Those people took your child from you.”

I recognize it then, where the rage comes from. That Nox knows what it is to be taken from one’s parents. To be stolen away.

I try to swallow, but it gets stuck in the lump in my throat. “My stepmother can be very persuasive. It’s just as likely that she convinced them I was the one who wanted to give my baby up. It would have been an easy lie for them to swallow. A baby to an unwed twelve-year-old… They would have assumed keeping the child would have ruined my life. If that’s the case, if she lied to them, they’re her victims too.”

Nox strokes my cheek in answer.

“I’m going to find my child one of these days,” I say, like I’m not going to die in this castle, whether at the queen’s hand or Cinderella’s hands or from old age after the queen keeps me trapped here my entire life. “Sometimes I imagine what it will be like. Whether I’ll peek through the window and find Rose playing with dolls by the warm fireplace. Sometimes I imagine watching from a distance as she skates on a frozen pond in the winter. Sometimes I don’t find her until she’s betrothed, and I get a job doing her paint for the wedding, and we laugh and joke, and I comfort her nerves as she blushes about her groom. Sometimes I see Theo, receiving his physician’s medal from the father who raised him, beaming up at him with such pride. Or reciting his poetry in the town square.

“When I find my child, so long as they’re happy and fed and loved, I’ll keep an eye on them from a distance. I’ll be there to help should they fall into any trouble. But I won’t ruin their happiness.”

Nox frowns, but he doesn’t argue with me. He just says, “You’re a good mother, Blaise.”

Tears prick at my eyes once more, and I fight back the urge to sob. Not, you would have made a good mother.

You are a good mother.

“And if you find your child in the care of someone like your stepmother?”

My blood runs cold, and I know it has to be showing in the way the skin around my jaw goes taut, but Nox doesn’t shift his gaze. He doesn’t blink.

“Then I’ll kill them.”