The Mad King (The Dark Kings #1)(51)

That damned bloody frog. Falling. Falling. Falling. Her terror of the water, desperate not to drown, and my own panic at the thought the crazy female might actually kill herself by holding her breath. Grabbing her. Moving her body against my own. Feeling each and every sexy curve of hers pressed to my hard and aching body. Sweat gathered on my brow as I prayed to the gods and continued to play.

Alice began to sway, losing herself to the music. A smile tipped the corners of her mouth. And I dared to hope, to believe in a miracle.

Her arms undulated as she danced for me. I wasn’t even sure if she knew what she was doing. Alice had always loved my music, saying that through it she’d felt my soul.

Alice and I had always had a connection beyond the mundane. We were two halves of the same mad whole. She was my perfect companion in every way.

I played the music, and now her song began to wind through the air, mixing with the visions playing out before us.

Always I’d told her she had the voice of an angel. I could listen to my Alice sing forever. If there was only one thing I could ever have of her again, this would have been it.

Her truth.

Her soul.

And she gave it now without asking for anything in return. Tears dripped, large and fat, off my face, but I would not stop. Because so long as I played I had my lover, my heartbeat, back.

Suddenly the sky was full of rain. And there I sat on a throne in the middle of a field whipping with frenzy and madness, clenching the neck of a bird I’d meant to end simply because I could no longer contain my insanity. My Alice stepped into the vision, stunning in her dress, drenched in rain and staring at me with love beaming in her eyes.

Her haunting words echoed between us. Cancer. It almost killed her once before. But she’d called to me as a child and I’d come to her in that life just as I had in this one.

I was her miracle, she’d said. The reason she’d fought. The reason she’d hung on.

For me.

For us.

My gaze shifted between the vision and the Alice before me now. The golden, glittering threads of magic that’d simply sparkled before me now gathered tighter and tighter into a rope that drew closer and closer to her.

This was either where I’d get my Alice back or lose her forever. I knew it.

And if she left, if she left me, I would have nothing else to live for.

I was pounding at the keys now. Banging with all the passion that beat within me. Using my music to reach deep into the very marrow of her, trying my hardest to make her remember what we’d once meant to one another.

For a moment she stopped singing, clutching her hands to her lips as she trembled, crying at the vision of her walking away. Her whispered words of “I saw you, Hatter. I saw you” echoed like a roll of thunder in the underworld.

She twirled on her feet, her eyes locking with mine as I shifted the memories yet again. To me. To the knowledge and panic that I’d lost her forever, and not because Wonderland hadn’t accepted her, but because I’d been too damned terrified to.

The madness I’d sunk into.

The depression.

How the animals and gardens outside my home began to sicken and die, my own diseased, ravaged brain the cause of their destruction. Her loss, slicing through me anew as I remembered those days without her. The utter desolation I’d felt.

The desperate need to simply die because each breath was an agony, each minute without her by my side so empty and void I’d no longer wanted to exist.

Tears as thick and large as my own slid down her cheeks as she trembled. I didn’t dare stop playing, but I knew the time of reckoning had come.

Moving as though in slow motion, she took one step forward. And then another. And another. The ropes of glittering gold now banded tight around her.

That’s when I knew.

That rope, it was her. Me. Us. It was our magic together. Who we were. Apart, we weren’t as powerful as together. I could not be Hatter without her, and she could not be Alice without me.

Alice had to accept that fact herself, and only then could we be together again. Only then could this darkest of magic be broken. I slowed my playing down. But the winds picked up, sounding like the strings of a large choir all around us.

This was not Wonderland but the underworld. And yet even here, the land breathed, it waited. It yearned just as I did.

And then she smiled, and those bands of gold shot through her form like an arrow, piercing her heart, her soul, illuminating her from the inside out. Her long hair gathered like the coils of an ebony-skinned snake and danced around her trim shoulders.

Her gown fluttered in the breeze around her ankles, the diaphanous movements ghostly and hypnotic.

My Alice glowed like living flame.

Radiant.

Alive.

And then it was over. The light vanished. The wind calm. The visions gone.

I stopped playing.

And everything grew heavy with silence.

My hands shook.

Her eyes opened. And the way she looked at me. I knew she remembered. Remembered it all. Agony crushed my soul.

She smiled.

Instantly the clouds parted. The sun burst through them. And the world came alive with the sounds of life. Insect chatter and bird song.

“Henrick Silas Hall,” she murmured.

I gasped. Only one person in all of Kingdom knew my true name. And I’d only ever given it to her in the other timeline.

Voice scratchy and feeling my pulse beat wild on the back of my tongue, I said in a whimpered grunt of shock, “Alice?”