I blinked in confusion. “I… I don’t understand.”

Two steps, and he tore down the wall of frigid distance between us, filling it with a heat I wanted to melt into. It consumed me, driving out the chill of death as I placed my hand on his leather cuirass. My head tipped back, and I stared up at his mangled face. Oh, his lips remained so perfectly curved. I licked my own at the sight.

He let his fingers sift through my hair, gently detangling the knots as his face lowered to mine, luring me deeper into him. His finger hooked beneath my chin, bringing my lips to hover inches from his, letting the back of my throat purr with anticipation.

I’d once told myself that I didn’t care about his love, but I was mistaken. Right now, I needed him to hold me and stroke the hair from my damp cheeks while I cried my heart out over the injustice of this all, the crimes committed to us.

Right this moment, I needed his love.

“Mmm, how twisted this has become, my little one. I sense how much you want my warmth, my touch, my heated skin against yours. And yet it holds no measure to how much I have wanted you. Have I not given you all my attention? My goodwill? My devotion?” His finger hooked deeper underneath my chin, lifting it until vertebras crackled in my neck. “Who… is… Elric?”

My swallow got stuck between a parched throat and the biting angle at which he kept my neck trapped. Everything made so much sense now, from how he must have felt my joy over the pregnancy to how his brother had once more helped himself to my thoughts.

I struggled my voice over the bitter taste of grief in my mouth. “Our baby… if it would have been a boy. My excitement you sensed was over finding that I carried your child in my belly. Still do.”

A moment of stillness.

A beat of suspended time.

Stepping back, he once again robbed me of his warmth, even removing the precious pain of his finger on my chin. “Now you have extinguished any doubt in me that you are a liar.”

I ignored the sinking feeling in my stomach and how it caused my wounds to itch beneath the blood-damp cotton. “Why would you say such a thing? Can you not sense it?”

“There is… no… child.” His voice came forth like the freezing trickle of a wintery creek, treacherously beautiful in its calm cadence. “There never was. There never… will… be.”

I placed my palm onto my belly, and a hint of doubt penetrated the anguish in my chest. What did that mean, there never was? I once more shifted my thighs, but sensed no wetness in my braies, nothing that would indicate that I had expelled… but how could this be?

“You’re wrong.” My tendons stiffened. “I… I had the morning sickness, and—”

“There is… no… child.” He stared at me with somber austerity, unshaken conviction chiseled into the hard edges of his jaws. “How dare you serve me this lie to distract from your betrayals.”

Anger flared to life at the back of my throat. “They stabbed me three times, but they killed twice!”

A muscle jumped in his jaws. “I might have believed that your mind conjured it up when it was not so, out of your desperate desire for a child. But I told you in the forest that you were not pregnant after your time of fruitfulness. Even told you that our coupling in the forest would not result in one, which renders this a farce.” He swallowed. “A most disgusting one.”

“Maybe… maybe it’s too small that you can’t feel it yet.”

“I sense everything, from the hair follicles breaking open with new growth to what might become a child settling in its mother’s womb.”

The room spun around me and my upper body swayed. “You’re lying.”

“Spare me your theatrics, trying to make yourself look like a fool when we both know you are not.” His upper lip twitched, a hairline crack in his detached demeanor. “I have never been anything but honest with you, a fact I now regret deeply. You dare serve me a lie about how you thought yourself pregnant to conceal your betrayal? After I told you how much I grieved the loss of my daughter?”

I flinched. “No. I… The grains, they… there is—”

“There is no child!” The Pale Court shook with the rage of Enosh’s shout, bonedust rilling from the walls before the god clenched his eyes shut. When he opened them again, the damage on his mask repaired, he leaned into me, capturing my cheek in the biting trap of his palm. “You never intended to return, for you found this damn happiness I never managed to inspire in you. Or anyone, for that matter. Who is Elric? Ought I hunt him down? Punish him for touching what is mine by setting his corpse into my throne like I have done with… Joah? I shall find him, and…”

His voice faded into the rush of my turbulent mind as the last fraying string of my sanity tore with a pop at some faraway cranny of my mind. Trembles ransacked me to the core, and I stumbled back into the biting chill of death. What had Enosh told Yarin at the Court Between Thoughts?

Thought that she carried my child.

Thought.

That word echoed.

Had I imagined it all? Had wanted Enosh’s promise to prove true so desperately that I’d talked myself into it? Could my mind truly cling to the hope of a child with such desperation that it had wrenched the food from my stomach each morning?

Perhaps I had.

When Enosh shifted in my periphery, once more turning for the bed, I grabbed his arm and let my hand brush over my wounds. “Please make them go away.”

Enosh stared at me, his face a still landscape of desolation as his eyes slipped to the wounds. “I find them quite pleasing to look at. You shall keep them, little one, offering us an eternal reminder of your faithlessness.”

His leather armor retreated as he stepped away from my touch and toward the bed, where he slumped onto the furs, leaving me behind to stand and stare for a minute or an hour.

For years, I’d wanted nothing more than a child. Within a day, I’d lost it twice. Once to a knife, and the second to Enosh’s shout.

They hurt equally.

As the room turned silent around the sleeping god, long after Orlaigh had fled the argument, all that existed was agony. That, and the piercing chill of death, driving me toward the only source of warmth in this cold, cold kingdom.

Enosh.

Dazed and confused, I climbed into bed but, no matter how many furs I draped over myself, my teeth chattered. How strange this was. When I’d first come to the Pale Court, Enosh had been drawn to my warmth. Now here I was, inching closer to where he slept, embracing the heat that emanated from his mutilated body.

My teeth ground together as I brushed my hand over his still face, sensing the thick, sticky soot collecting on my fingertips. I stroked down along his stomach, over the tip of a rib that protruded from mending flesh, and around what looked like a hole in his abdomen.

He must have gone through agonizing pain, and I wasn’t sure who to blame for all this. The god for abandoning his duty and enraging the people? Myself for insisting on rotting my late husband, who’d brought me nothing but sorrow? Or my own kind, who’d killed me when I’d only tried to help?

Maybe we all were in dire need of forgiveness.

Something Enosh threatened I would never receive from him, letting me depart a nightmare only to slip straight into hell. I curled up beside him, letting coldness drive me into the arms of the devil who ruled it.

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Chapter 3

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Ada

Only hunger.

Only hunger.

My mind recited the words like a prayer where I soaked in the boiling spring—had for long enough that my skin resembled a dried prune. Salt and sulfur seasoned the stagnant air and the water gently lapped at the stony edges in time to each vibrating gurgle roiling in my stomach.