What Lurks Between the Fates (Of Flesh & Bone, #3)(9)

“Something that would have done anything for even just a taste of your blood,” he answered vaguely. His face remained hidden by his hood that draped over the front of his head and torso. Whatever existed below it was lost to the darkness within, making me wonder if he was even a man at all or something else entirely.

“Why?” I whispered, and the sound bounced between us.

He chuckled, the sound deep and entirely otherworldly. “You might be oblivious to your true nature, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t creatures out there who see you for exactly what you are, girl,” he said, slipping his oar into the water. He rowed away, turning his skiff away from me as I scrambled after him.

“Wait! Tell me what I am!” I called after him, watching as he moved impossibly fast. I seemed unable to follow. My feet moved, but it was as if I ran in place. “Please!”

“Be careful what you ask for, Little Bird.” He stopped rowing, turning back to me slowly until only the glow of golden eyes came from beneath his hood as his stare met mine. “Some secrets are better left in the dark.”

My world spun, his face disappearing as he turned away, leaving me to collapse in the water. My lungs filled with air, as if they’d been deprived the entire time I was in this place. What absorbed me wasn’t the river.

It was the hard stone floor beneath me in a cell.

I suddenly thrust myself into a sitting position.

Caldris stared at me, his expression as confused as mine.

***

“Estrella?” Caldris asked.

He sat on the opposite side of the iron bars of his cell. A stone passage separated us, hobbled and broken between the two free-standing prisons holding us separate. I felt the iron surrounding me, elevated slightly over the damp passage between us. Something scurried in the back corner of my cell, tempting my eyes away from the mate who stared at me as if he couldn’t believe I existed.

“Thank fucking Gods. Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been?”

“Some secrets are better left in the dark…” I whispered, my voice trailing off as the words fell from my lips. A reiteration of something I knew well; the words slid off my tongue like a well-known, familiar mantra.

“What did you just say?” Caldris asked, maneuvering to his knees. He paused with his hands only a breath from the iron of the bars, his head cocking to the side as he studied me intently.

“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head, determined that it had been only a figment of my imagination; a moment in a dream where I tried to grasp onto something even remotely familiar in a time when everything I’d ever known had been torn from my hands.

“Say. It. Again,” Caldris ordered, his voice dropping lower with the tone of command I recognized. It was the same one he’d used on me that day in the tunnels, when something had compelled me to flee the cave beast and leave him behind.

My mouth dropped open, ready to confess all my secrets at the first word from him.

I clamped it shut in defiance. “You will not do that ever again,” I snapped, forcing the same tone to my voice.

Caldris’s eyes flashed in a moment of darkness, black bleeding through the bright blue of his stare. We didn’t know what I was; we didn’t know if whatever it was would ever stand as his equal or if I would remain lesser next to his status as a God.

His lips tipped into a smirk, confirming my suspicions that he would enjoy every second of the battle if I proved to be a worthy opponent in every way. Just as he enjoyed me when I threatened to bleed him, he would never desire a mate who always did as she was told.

“All right, my star. Then tell me what I want to know. I can feel it rattling around inside your head, but I want to hear you say the words,” he said, dropping his hands to his side. They clenched into fists, his frustration pulsating down the bond. He wanted to touch me, wanted to reach me, but the hall that separated us and the iron bars prevented it.

I raised my chin, severing our eye contact to look around the cell that would probably be my new home. Water ran down the stone in the hallway just outside, and iron bars surrounded me on all sides of the small square I occupied. Chains dangled from the ceiling in the hallway outside, and torture instruments hung from the walls. I swallowed.

“Some secrets are better left in the dark,” I whispered, raising my eyes to his dark stare once more.

“Show me,” he murmured, the command less forceful than the last. Instead of feeling like it would tear submission from me, it tickled the edges of my consciousness, playing the threads of our bond like a violin.

I closed my eyes, drawing in a deep breath as I drew the memory of what I’d seen, of the teeth and golden eyes, to the forefront of my mind. My father’s words struck me in the chest, haunting me from the form of someone who was not him. Someone who could not and would never be him.

No father of mine would have rowed away from me, leaving me lying on the top of the river. He’d have pulled me up and put me in the boat with him, finally reunited with me after death had separated us for years.

And my father did not possess the glowing golden eyes that sank into my soul and tormented me.

“The ferryman,” Caldris murmured softly, his gaze snagging mine as the memory ended.

I jolted back to my body, pulled from the immersive experience of witnessing it with Caldris for the first time.

“Why would the ferryman use the same phrases as my father?” I asked, swallowing as my mate’s stare turned confused.