Bring Me Their Hearts(66)
He rolls his eyes and begins to walk. For one lucid, moonlight-kissed moment, I stroll with Lucien arm in arm, flush with the dance and drunk on my own humanity, drunk on the illusion of freedom I have right now underneath this starry sky, surrounded by this labyrinthine city. The thought of taking his heart surfaces once, twice, but I fight it back down to the depths, refusing to let this moment be ruined. Just one moment of being human—is that too much to ask?
But that’s what I said to myself before the parade dance, too. I’m getting greedy. As I admire his hawkish profile, proud and severe, the hunger refuses to be ignored.
If he knew what you were, he’d split you apart with that white sword of his. Hunt you, like he hunts the other monsters.
I pull my arm from his suddenly. It’s true. The prince would kill me if he knew what I was. His sword gleams cold on his waist as he turns, brow furrowed.
“Is something wrong, Lady Zera?”
“I-I just remembered,” I say. “Who we are. You’re the Crown Prince, and I’m a lady. It isn’t right to act so close.”
Lucien’s face falls. “Act? Is that what you think this has been? I’m not acting.” His gaze turns searing. “Are you?”
Yes.
“No,” I start. “It’s just—”
He leans in, suddenly close. The smell of him—mixed with sweat and night air now—dizzies me, infects down to my marrow and sets it ablaze. He’s so human. So dark and svelte and lean, his lips incredibly close and incredibly alluring. A kiss. What would it feel like, to kiss a prince, a boy, a bird of prey? To be close to someone, gentle with someone, after three years of nothing but regret and pain?
“If I were to kiss you here and now,” he murmurs, voice rumbling in my chest, “it would not be an act.”
He presses into those last few inches of distance between us, and the hunger ambushes me from nowhere.
MINE! it screams, growing my teeth long and hazing my vision with red. MINE AT LAST!
With the fragments of clear sanity I have left, I thrust my arms forward, pushing him away. Lucien staggers back, and the heat between us goes instantly cold.
“I—” I swallow acid regret and relief all at once, thanking the gods for the mask that hides my face, my jagged teeth. “I can’t. It’s not right.”
Prince Lucien looks incredulous—not with me for pushing him away but with himself. He looks down at his hands as though he’s unsure whose they are. And then suddenly, before I can scrape up a joke to patch the wound, a shrill scream breaks the air. Lucien’s head snaps up to the source—a derelict house we’d been approaching.
“Not the market,” he whispers through clenched teeth, and dashes beneath the ruined wood of the doorframe. Flustered and worried, I follow. The whole house is charred black—a victim of a long-ago fire. The screaming emanates from beneath us somehow, and I’m baffled until Lucien yanks open a trapdoor I thought was a scorched pile of wood. He leaps down and I follow into a barely lit tunnel lined with brick. The screams get louder, joined by yelling and rough orders being shouted. The clank of armor.
It’s all so sudden and jarring—so surreal as Lucien draws his sword and I draw mine. We were at peace not a minute ago, weren’t we? Time stood still in Nightsinger’s forest, but here it leaps and bounds forward.
The tunnel opens up into a cavernous room, though it seems small, since the floor is choked with a mass of writhing, panicking people. Ramshackle stalls selling food and cloth are overturned, the crowd itself dressed in nothing more than rags—this must be the black market Lucien was talking about. Between the rags shines silvery lawguard armor as they beat down the crowd with oak batons. Children cry as mothers shield them, men forced to the ground and pinned by their arms, celeons with their furred hackles raised, daring the lawguards—some of them celeon themselves—to come close. And the smell of blood—blood on foreheads, blood dripping from broken noses. Blood in pools beneath motionless bodies. So much chaos and fear sends the hunger salivating within me.
And above it all, standing on a lip of brick flanked by lawguards and oil lamps, stands Archduke Gavik. He watches the chaos with his pitiless watery eyes, watches his lawguards drag off screaming, kicking people, his expression bloated with satisfaction.
“Bastard,” Prince Lucien hisses. “This way!” He calls out to the crowd, ushering some of them to the entrance we just came from. I’m frozen, and Lucien barks at me. “What are you doing? Help me get them out!”
The smell of human blood seeps into my nostrils, my teeth growing long. The crowd undulates, panic making their eyes wide like cattle doomed to the chopping block. Lucien slams a hand on my shoulder.
“Now, Lady Zera! Before more die!”
His warm touch chases the hunger away, releasing me from its grasp. There’s a fraction of a second in which I marvel at just how clear my head is—the hunger blown out like nothing more than leaves in a storm. The prince is right. These people are in danger, and five men are all I can bear on my conscience.
As soon as the hunger leaves, it surges back like a dark tide.
Selfish, the hunger cackles. Even saving these pitiful people is just for your own peace of mind.
I put my arms around an old woman clutching at her headscarf and lead her down the tunnel, her grandchildren sobbing on her heels.
So weak. Soft, weak bones, easy to rip apart. A simple meal.