Frostblood (Frostblood Saga #1)(82)
“Do you want me?” asked Rasmus against my lips, his hand sliding to my lower back, his hips pressing against mine.
As I was lost in ecstasy, part of me wanted to say yes. I wanted the darkness. I wanted the power. I wanted the bliss. You give me all these things, and therefore I want you.
But something flickered at the corner of my mind, memories of warmth. Most of the people I loved were gone, but there was someone who needed me, someone I cared about more than darkness and power. I saw eyes a dozen shades of blue that went from cold to hot in a heartbeat. I had told myself to forget him, but he had come back and he depended on me. I couldn’t turn away from Arcus now.
As Rasmus’s lips moved over mine, connecting me to his darkness and the darkness of the throne, heat came rushing back into my chest. I sent it into the hand that rested on the throne, fire flowing from my heart through my arms and into the jagged ice. The surface began to melt, a hand-shaped indentation forming in the ice. Drops of water hit my feet. Rasmus sucked in a breath and shoved me away, something stark and vulnerable flashing through his eyes before his expression hardened.
“Why did you really come here?”
He swept his hand around the room, sealing the door with a sparkling layer of frost before offering that same hand to me. Instinctively, I moved backward, toward the door.
“Have you ever loved anyone, Ruby?”
The question took me aback, but I needed to keep him talking, stalling while I tried to think of a way out. “I loved my mother. M-my grandmother.”
“How about now? Whom do you love now?”
I hesitated. “I love… my people.”
“You don’t even know your people. Why would you want to?”
“A million reasons you’d never understand.”
“So you can feel like you belong?” he suggested. “Well, I was raised with my people and I never belonged. My frost was weak compared with my brother’s, and my father hated me for it. He used to fill me with bits of ice, enough to cause excruciating pain but not enough to kill. He hoped to make me more powerful, to strengthen my gift.”
I swallowed hard. “That’s terrible.”
“It cut me off from everyone, never understood, never accepted. When I took the throne, the advisors thought they could make sport of me, stealing from the royal coffers, belittling me just out of hearing, making a farce of my reign. But the throne understood my fears and helped me kill one of them in front of the rest. Suddenly, they respected my power, and the darkness brought me joy and took my pain, much as it takes your heat. It feeds off things that are hot: passion, hatred, violence.”
I pressed a hand to my stomach, battling nausea. My own hatred and violence had fed the very throne I had come to destroy.
“But I was still frozen,” he continued. “The throne has no cure for that. When I saw you in my arena, when I watched you burn the hearts of your enemies without a second of hesitation, I thought, There she is. She is fire. She is heat. She was meant for me. I found out about your pain, your sorrow, so I would know how to blacken your heart, to make you strong.”
The throne still pulled at me, and, despite myself, so did his soft words.
“I’m already strong,” I said, “just in a different way.” I took a breath, remembering that I was a healer’s daughter. “Perhaps there is a chance for you. He always wanted me to heal you.”
His eyes narrowed. “Who?”
I made a helpless gesture. “Arcus. He wanted me to break the curse and heal you. I don’t know how we can do it, but maybe we can find out.”
He moved closer, slowly, like one would approach a wild dog. His voice shook, his eyes shining like polished onyx. “The way you say his name, Ruby… I felt you rip yourself from the darkness, from me, to protect my brother when you should have killed him.” Hurt flashed in his eyes, swift as lightning, leaving them darker than before. “Why didn’t you kill him?”
I spread my palms. “I never wanted to kill anyone.”
“You killed before. Why not him, Ruby?”
I felt as if I was being backed into a trap. “He’s my friend.”
Rasmus took my chin between his finger and thumb in a bruising grip. “Why wouldn’t you kill him?”
“I would never hurt Arcus,” I said, shoving him away with all my strength, any thought of healing gone. “I would die first!”
There was a thick, pulsing silence before he spoke, his voice tempered steel. “If you refuse the throne, you refuse me. You’re not strong in the way I need you to be. And I detest weakness.”
He flicked his hand at me, and I was covered in ice up to my waist. I willed my skin to grow hot, but the ice thickened and crept up my body.
“Good-bye, Ruby,” he said. “Know that your death will increase the throne’s power. So it wasn’t a complete waste.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE DOORS TREMBLED AS SOMEthing crashed against them, cracking the ice that sealed them with each blow. They split open and Arcus pushed through, breathing heavily, his head bare, a blood-smeared sword held in his hand.
Rasmus, poised and ready, hit Arcus in the chest with a bolt of frost, slamming him into the stone wall. Another bolt caught Arcus’s wrist, opening his hand. The sword clanged as it fell to the tiled floor, then froze with a thick block of ice covering it.