Heartless

❆ Twenty-Three ❆

Twenty Three

Morning came with unforgiving aches and pains that had absolutely nothing to do with the way I'd slept— the bed was one of the softest things I'd ever laid on and nothing would ever change that. But something had changed. And this time it was inside me.

    I stretched myself along the thick duvets with an exhausted yawn until my fingers stumbled and curled around a warm hand. Cool breaths fanned across my face; I felt my lips tug into a smile.  "I thought you said you wouldn't sleep with me," I murmured hoarsely, still keeping my face buried in the lush pillows.

    "You're not my type, sweetheart," came a lilting, feminine voice.

    My eyes sprang open. Stones of bright sapphire stared back at me instead of glistening iron. I shot upright in the bed and hurried to wrap the blankets around myself. "Lumea!" I shrieked. Heat burned through my face. "I-I didn't know you were here."

    She arched her manicured brow with a sly grin. "Who were you expecting?"

    I stumbled off the bed and behind the screen to dress; I rummaged through the wardrobe to find something decent other than my underwear. "W-What are you doing here?"

    A pair of dark trousers and a billowing white blouse toppled over my side of the screen. "Beast wrote to me early this morning about the fire." She paused; I could already feel the tension beginning to seethe. "He said your friend Gabriel did it."

    "We don't know that," I snapped curtly, shoving myself into the pants. I paused after buttoning them. How much of last night did she know? Had he told her about the book, that I'd run away and nearly been killed by that thing in the tunnels?

    Did she know about the kiss?

    I stepped out from behind the screen to find her biting her lip, her arms crossed as she stared at me blankly. "He said you are going to see him."

    I walked toward the mirror, gaping at the hard lines of exhaustion on my face and the dark circles looming under my eyes. Lumea appeared behind me to work on the knotted tangles of my hair. She combed in silence, eyes locked on her working fingers as she untangled each lock, but I knew the silence wouldn't last very long. Finished, she tied off the end with a silk ribbon and stepped back. "Adaira," she began with a sigh, "are you sure you want to do this? Have you thought about what might have happened if you had actually been here when he set the fire?"

    "Well, I wasn't."

    "Yes, but what if you were?"

    "But I wasn't," I repeated firmly, glaring at her in the mirror.

    Our gazes held for several long moments before she nodded coldly. "Okay," she muttered. "I just worry about your safety. We all do."

    I left her to put on my boots. "Gabriel is my friend, Lumea; he would never hurt me."

    She frowned. "If you say so."

❆

The tension within the silent dining hall was thick enough to cut with a knife; the silence was louder than anything I'd ever heard. The sounds of forks and knives scraping against plates made my teeth grind, our jaws crunched the food into bits and pieces, but no one spoke. Each noise only furthered the rigid atmosphere, both of them eating with angry stabs. It seemed as if at any given moment one of them would leap across the table and lunge at me. Lumea pushed her eggs around her plate with a grumpy frown.

    Beast leaned back in his chair. I could feel his eyes roaming over me; he undoubtedly knew what havoc the intensity of his gaze was wreaking on my body. Warmth shot down my spine and pooled in my stomach at the thought of what had happened last night. His eyes clicked to his sister. "This isn't a graveyard, ladies," he said with a slight tint of humor in his voice. "Will someone please say something?"