But I’ve been locked up before; I’ve been alone before.

The queen thinks she will break me. She thinks I’m the vapid girl everyone assumes me to be.

But I’m acquainted with the shadows.

I learned long ago to make them my friends.

So while the queen believes she’s breaking me, I lull myself to sleep with the sound of her son’s screams.

When I sleep, I sleep well.

Because I am nothing if not defiant.

I’m woken by the screech of metal against metal. It jolts me from a dream—one that I suppose most would consider a nightmare, where I’m melting off the face of a sniveling boy who looks nothing like Nox.

I’m on my feet in an instant, but I’m not yet fully recovered from my own wounds, and the movement is too sudden. My feet go numb against the stone floor, needles of sharp pain prickling in my legs.

It’s still dark, so I don’t see him when he catches me.

I just feel him. His arms sure and steady as they lock underneath mine, his heart pounding as my cheek collides with his chest.

I hardly feel them, but I think my tears are soaking his shirt.

He says nothing as he lowers me to the ground and sets my back against the base of the dais.

Then his touch is gone, and its absence hurts worse than any ache I experienced while his venom worked its way out of my system.

“Nox…” My voice is weak with disuse.

“You might want to cover your eyes,” he says, his equally hoarse.

I frown, and panic wells inside me. Did I underestimate how fully Nox’s burns would heal? Have I scarred him permanently?

Does he think I won’t wish to look at him?

But then a flame flares in a nearby lantern, and the light sears my vision. I slam my eyes shut and cover them with my hands.

I wait for the gentle tease. The you didn’t listen, why am I not surprised? But it doesn’t come.

Vials clank and rattle across the room.

When I peek my eyes open for the fifth time and pain doesn’t scour my senses, I search for Nox. He’s at the workstation, mixing something foul into the vials. His back is turned to me, but I scour his neck, his forearms and hands as he works.

The sigh is instinctual when I see no scars.

It doesn’t stop the urge to run my fingers over his skin, to slide his sleeves up his forearms and check for the evidence of the pain I inflicted on his body.

The past few days, stuck in the dark cell with only my thoughts to keep me company, I’ve relished in Farin’s screams, in punishing him for what he’s done to Nox.

But now that I see my friend, guilt washes over me in thick waves, the type too dense to wade through.

“Nox, I’m so sorry…I didn’t—”

“Stop.”

My words get stuck in my throat, and the harshness in his tone digs into my sides like cramps after a long race.

“Don’t you ever apologize to me again. Not after what I did to you,” he says.

The urges are back, to wrap my arms around him and hold him and never let him go, but when I make to cross the room, his ears tilt backward on his head and his entire body goes stiff.

Does he still thirst for me? Can he remember the taste of my blood?

Of course he can; he told me as much.

I remember everything.

“Did it still hurt when you woke up?” I mean his burns, whether his immortal flesh healed before he woke to the agony, but when the words slip out, they seem to take form in the stale air between us.

They’re a low grunt, and a soft scowl, and the patches of mismatched skin.

Of course, it still hurts.

The wound that will linger and fester, regardless of the smoothness of Nox’s skin.

“Not as much as I deserve,” is all he says before he returns to work.

When I pad my way over to him at the workbench, he doesn’t turn to acknowledge me.

“Please look at me,” I ask. Beg. Because he hasn’t yet, and I can’t bear it. Can’t bear for the last memory of his eyes to be the ones that didn’t belong to him.

His jaw bulges, as if he’s resisting turning toward me, and there’s something about his shame that stings all over. In my gut and my lungs and my throat and my soul, and I’d take his teeth in my neck before I’d take this.

But then his eyes settle upon me. They’re pale and hollow and utterly empty.

But they’re unmistakably Nox’s.

So I decide I’ll take them.

“Do you hate me?” The question slips out of my mouth, hangs in the stale air between us that refuses to budge.

A notch forms between his eyebrows. The vial doesn’t clatter when he sets it on the table.

“How could you even ask me that?” he asks, his voice as empty as his eyes.

A lump forms in my throat, and my vision begins to blur as tears sting at the rims of my eyelids. “Right. Of course you do. I didn’t mean to say you shouldn’t…I just…”

“Why would you think that I hate you?”