Filed to story: When the Moon Hatched Book
Silence reigns.
He steps closer to the bars, arms crossed over his broad chest, the uncomfortable absence of sound dragging on for so long it pecks at me.
“Were you … waiting for something?” I ask, frowning.
“Yes. For you to shift into the light so I can see your face.”
I snort-laugh.
Righteous asshole.
“No, thank you. You’ll have to step through those iron bars and drag me into the light yourself.”
There’s a moment of pause before he grips the lock hanging from my door, knuckles blanching. The metal creaks and groans, and he rips his arm down—
I suck a sharp breath as the lock comes away.
Broken.
He lifts his hand and makes a show of loosening his fingers, letting the useless lump of metal fall to the ground with a clatter that echoes off the walls to the tune of my rallying heart.
Fuck.
“I’m not usually one to take things from a female that aren’t given freely,” he rumbles, swinging the latch off the hook. “However, your voice reminds me of somebody I used to know, and I’ve spent five sleepless slumbers convinced I’m going mad.”
He boots the door open, the sound of squealing hinges carving across my nerves, reminding me of times I was dragged from another cell—feet first, fingernails gouging the stone while I snarled through gritted teeth.
He takes the first step in, and I pull my feet back toward my bum, gritting my teeth against a bludgeoning howl as I push my weight against my shredded back and leverage myself to a wobbly stand. “Hate to break it to you like this,” I hiss, “but I’d never seen you before that slumber on the south side of the wall.”
“For your sake,” he growls, stalking forward, packing the space full of his massive presence, “I hope you’re wrong.”
“And if I’m not?”
He steps into my shadow, almost close enough for me to reach out and touch him, my next breath laced with a drugging punch of his rich, molten scent.
He flips back his hood, revealing that beautiful, hard face.
My lungs snag at the sight of him.
Lips pinched in a line, he steals another step forward.
“And if I’m not?”
“Vaghth,” he whispers, the scalding word a flame against my conscience.
My spine stiffens, every nerve in my body tingling in all the wrong ways.
The lantern overhead rattles—like something inside is trying to escape.
One of its tiny panes pops, a shred of flame fluttering down into his cupped hand and cradled before my face like a mold of clay.
His thick black brows collide, his face blanching as my teeth clamp together, heart seizing.
Eye bulging.
I look at that flame like the spitting, scalding enemy it is, waiting for him to drag it across my flesh and paint a puckered trail.
A choked sound slips out of him, like his lungs forgot how to work.
He lifts a trembling hand as if to cup my cheek, leaving an inch of space separating us—the heat radiating off his palm akin to a ray of sunshine.
“H—” His stare blazes back and forth across my face, tracing the slopes of me with devastating precision. “H-
how?”
Something about the way he rasps the word cuts me down the middle, like he’s stuffing those big, strong arms into my frosty depths, churning my lake into a storm of slush.
I open my mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a blow of frosty air.
Tension stiffens in the space between us.
The hand so close to cradling my face pulls back, crunching into a ball. He punches the wall behind my head with such force a hairline crack forms in the stone, weaving across my ceiling.
A litter of mildew rains upon us.
“How?”
he bellows, and I growl, upper lip peeling back from canines aching to snap forward and sink into his flesh.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I snarl, wanting him out.
Gone.
Wanting the flame in his hand extinguished before it tills up any more of the hurt I’ve worked so hard to rid myself of.
“She speaks the truth,” comes a wobbly voice from the opposite cell. From the dark-haired Truthtune who only stopped crying eighty-nine ceiling drops earlier.
I thought she was asleep.
The male frowns, rips his cinder stare off me, and stabs it over his shoulder in her direction. “You a Truthtune?”
“I am. The female is confused by your interest. She is also petrified of—“
“That’s enough,” I snip, my words ricocheting off the walls.
The male turns his attention back on me, his all-consuming stare etched in so many shades of disbelief.
He crushes the flame in his large, calloused hand, though I have only a brief moment of reprieve before he pulls a metal weald from his pocket and flicks back the lid, revealing a bloodred bulb of Sabersythe flame.
My throat constricts, a strangled sound squeezing through the tightening space. A sound I want to crush from existence the moment it leaves my lips.
He raises his other hand, the rough tips of his fingers sweeping a tendril of hair from my forehead, leaving a wake of tingling flesh.
“Get your hand off me,” I seethe as he tucks the fall of inky locks behind my ear.
His chest boils with a sound that makes me picture the ground shaking, the tip of his finger tracing the jagged scar on my forehead. A scar that can be seen by dragonflame—the only substance in existence that can ignite a trail of long-ago runes and unearth their glowing ghosts.
“Your head,” he rasps. “You’ve been mended.”
Mended …
Such a funny word, signifying the end of something. But every hurt has an echo if you look deep enough.
A wound is never fully gone.
“Don’t remember getting that one.”
Not a lie.
His gaze dips. “Your eye. What happened?”
“Tripped on a stone.”
His head banks to the side. “Did it reach up and punch you in the face?”