Chapter Forty
My vision came back to me first, returning like the screen of an old TV set in reverse. Just a pinprick of colour and light that steadily grew out to the edges, until I realised I could see… everything.
Not just the weak halo from the lantern still placed at our feet. The entire hall. I could see the tiny details carved into the dancing figures decorating the door all the way at the other end of the cavernous room. The light was muted and blue grey. I looked around for its source but couldn’t find one.
My skin was hot now. So hot. My chest heaved with my panting breaths, but my heart was slowing. Calming.
Lonan was still pressed against me. I didn’t know if it was the new heat emanating from me that made him jerk back. He stared at me with glistening black eyes, face streaked with tears.
“Ash,” he whispered.
I could see him so clearly now. Everything was sharper. His face looked… more inhuman. Still beautiful, but almost cruelly so.
His eyes weren’t just black, I realised, wondering how I’d never noticed it before. They gleamed with purples and emerald greens as they darted frantically over my face. His skin was still milky white, but in the strange light somehow filling this room, it looked almost blue tinged.
“Ash,” he whispered again, voice trembling. He raised a shaking hand to my face, looking awed, but I jerked my head away.
“Don’t touch me.”
My voice no longer shook with the cold or slurred from impending death. It sounded stronger—lower. For a brief moment, I thought it wasn’t even my own. It was rough from my dry throat, but there was something… different.
Lonan’s hand had frozen in mid-air, his long fingers twitching with his apparent desire to touch my face. I felt my eyes harden as I stared back at him.
“I said don’t touch me.” I flicked my gaze down to the hand still on my chest. “Get off me.”
I didn’t know what was happening to me—why I hadn’t died. It had felt like I was a split-second from eternal nothingness. I vaguely remembered a last moment of warmth, a whispered voice telling me to embrace it. Had that been… death? Had I fought it, to spite Lonan and his plea for me not to?
Or had it been something else, and I’d done what it told me to in my last moment?
Lonan’s breath caught in his throat, and he reluctantly lifted his hand from my chest. But before I could say anything else—tell him to get the fuck away from me completely—he lowered himself to his knees before me, hands trailing down my sides to grasp my hips tight.
He tipped his face into my lower stomach. “Please forgive me.”
I stilled. Did he think this would erase it all or make me keep falling for his lies? Getting on his knees and begging?
“Get up.” My voice was hard.
Lonan’s forehead pressed to my bare stomach as he shook his head.
“Get. Up,” I repeated through clenched teeth, my hands clenching into fists. Fire burned hot in me, making me feel like I could snap these fucking chains still holding me captive.
“Ash.” His voice was pleading. Tortured, as if he thought it would garner some sympathy. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Get off me,” I roared, shocked at the power in my own voice. I drew my knee up and booted Lonan in the chest, shoving him back.
His breath wheezed out of him, and he reached up and rubbed his chest as he stared at me. But then he immediately scrambled back onto his knees, and my teeth clenched hard at the idea of him touching me again.
“Don’tfucking touch me.”
My chest burned with a different ache this time, and my arms shook with the need todosomething. To move. I wanted to beat the shit out of him for doing this to me. For destroying me, worse than his mother ever could.
Like they were nothing more than tissue or thin cloth, the chains holding my arms suspended snapped.
Shock momentarily froze me as I stared down at the manacles on my wrists, a few links still attached to each one.
How… How had I done that?
My wide-eyed, stunned gaze lifted to meet Lonan’s. He was still kneeling in front of me, his chest heaving with fast breaths. He shuffled forwards one step, an arm reaching up.