I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with tootache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.
And once enslaved, people forget their freedom so quickly and profoundly that ‘it seems impossible that they will awake and have it back, serving so freely and gladly that one would say, to see them, that they have not lost their liberty, but won their servitude’.
Reklam
The white wolf
The white wolf was watching her again.
Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius ran an ironclad finger over
the rim of the stone altar on which she lay.
As much movement as she could manage.
Cairn had left her here this time. Had not bothered moving her to the
iron box against the adjacent wall.
A rare reprieve. To wake not in darkness, but in flickering firelight.
The braziers were dying, beckoning in the damp cold that pressed to
her skin. To whatever wasn’t covered by the iron.
She’d already tugged on the chains as quietly as she could. But they
held firm.
They’d added more iron. On her. Starting with the metal gauntlets.
She did not remember when that was. Where that had been. There had
only been the box then.
The smothering iron coffin.
She had tested it for weaknesses, over and over. Before they’d sent
that sweet-smelling smoke to knock her unconscious. She didn’t know
how long she’d slept after that.
When she’d awoken here, there had been no more smoke.
She’d tested it again, then. As much as the irons would allow. Pushing
with her feet, her elbows, her hands against the unforgiving metal. She
didn’t have enough room to turn over. To ease the pain of the chains
digging into her. Chafing her.
The lash wounds etched deep into her back had vanished. The ones
that had cleaved her skin to the bone. Or had that been a dream, too?
She had drifted into memory, into years of training in an assassin’s
keep. Into lessons where she’d been left in chains, in her own waste,
until she figured out how to remove them.
But she’d been bound with that training in mind. Nothing she tried in
the cramped dark had worked.
Slowly Falling for him
I glance at Talan cautiously. “Whose blood is on your sword?”
“Someone made the mistake of testing my patience. You’d think people
would have learned by now.”
Vague. Annoyingly so. “Another traitor?”
He cuts me a sharp look. “I won’t let anyone get in my way.”
A chill ripples up my spine as he stalks over the snow.
The air seems to grow heavier and otherworldly until the forest opens
into a clearing, a path lined with ancient statues and pale purple hedges. On
the far end of the path, the Lost Palace emerges from the wintry forest, a
haunting edifice of twists and curves. Ice and snow glaze the stones,
sparkling in the pale light. Fog billows around a frozen garden of heather
and bare yews. Moths flutter around us—not metallic, but real ones that are
bright blue. Corbinelle moths. Beautiful to look at, but they’re venomous.
Like Talan, really.
Stone arches frame a door of carved oak, peaked in the center. As we
walk closer, my gaze flicks up at the statues. I stop to stare at one of them, a
towering, crowned queen with long hair that drapes over her robes. My
gaze slides to the symbols on her wrists, and an ember of recognition sparks
in my mind. The encircled triple spirals remind me of the ones I saw in
Nimuë’s tower—and look exactly like the ones I’d seen on my wrists for a
moment in the bathtub. As I stare at them, cold magic slides over my wrists.
Talan follows my stare. “That’s Nimuë. She built this palace long ago.
She’s buried here, in fact. Did you know that before she was the Lady of the
Lake, my grandmother had that role? Before she was queen.”
I stare at the triple spirals again. Three Ladies of the Lake. “Queen
Morgan.”
Thank the ancient gods we don’t have the same grandmother in reality,
given some of the filthy thoughts I’ve had about him.
I draw a shaky
My mind reels. All this time I was hearing his thoughts, I never
imagined he was hearing mine, too.
I lie awake until dawn.
Like I said MORE
I wake in the night, horrified to find that I’ve curled myself around his
body—one arm around his chiseled abs, my thigh wrapped around his hips.
In this position, I feel the full length of him, his hard cock pressed against
the inside of my thigh. He’s enormous and built like a god in every way,
isn’t he?
Here is my body forsaking me yet again—as I slept, I crawled to him
and wrapped myself around him, lured by his exquisite beauty and his
smell.
I’m frozen, my pulse racing. At the feel of his arousal, heat slides
through my body.
This would all be much easier if he looked like a troll.
I glance up and find the Dream Stalker lying awake, staring at the
ceiling.
Fuck.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “I was asleep.”
“My dear Nia, you have absolutely nothing to apologize for. You should
wrap yourself around me whenever you want.” His voice is a velvet caress
over my skin.
I force myself to pull my arm away, slide my leg off him, and shift
across the bed again. As soon as I’m away from him, I feel cold and tense.
But I pull the covers tightly, gripping the sheets, and force my breathing to
slow. I summon that mental veil again and drift off to sleep.
Reklam
Reklam