My teeth rattled as I struggled against his emotions. “You don’t know me at all.”
“Don’t tell me what I know!” He slammed me back again. I winced where the wall connected with the lump at the back of my skull. Anton’s dagger lifted. The blade caught the candlelight. I shook my head infinitesimally. I couldn’t let him get involved. Valko would have his brother executed if the prince tried and failed to kill him. And even if Anton aimed true, I wasn’t sure I could allow the emperor to die. Not even now. “You will respect me!” Valko shouted.
Find a space within yourself and cling to it.
This was that space—the small part of me that pulled away from the emperor, that defied him. He grabbed my wrists, one after the other, and pinned them against the wall. My head pulsed from being hit twice. My belly rumbled from starvation. My legs shook, ready to give way.
The space in me wasn’t great enough. Not against him.
A sob racked through my labored breathing, the weak fight in me to hold myself together. I needed emotional release. Every Auraseer had a form. Yuliya’s blood. Tola’s tears. Dasha’s hair. Nadia had the bite from staining her skin. Izolda, no doubt, welcomed the sting of splinters beneath her nails. Every release had one thing in common: pain.
My heartbeat thrashed through my ears as I fought to channel myself into a tiny space of control. Tremors racked my body in resistance, but I forced my suffering to intensify. I focused on every part of me that hurt. I needed pain to ground me for now, and in desperation, I sought it. I clung to it.
The throbbing of my head. Valko’s iron grip on my wrists. The stabbing ache from my wound. The cramped knots in my starved stomach. The fire lining my throat from being half strangled.
I whimpered. I didn’t want to feel more. I didn’t know if this was helping at all. Pain would give me emotional distance from Valko, but it wouldn’t free me from his physical abuse.
“Do you respect yourself?” I asked the emperor in a fragile, broken voice. I faltered between succumbing to the beast in him and my inward chanting of I’m not enough. Nothing’s enough.
Valko’s mouth hovered near mine. His aura growled with hunger, with the dominion he sought to prove over me. “Of course I do.”
My breath came in short gasps. My heart hammered. “You were once a child like me, torn from your parents, from everything you knew. Abandoned when you needed love. You still need it.” His eyes rose from my lips to meet my beseeching gaze. “But not like this,” I said. “This isn’t love.”
I’d said the wrong thing. One of his hands released mine, only to rear back, preparing to strike me. Anton’s grip flexed on his dagger. He was close enough to reach us by one leaping bound. No. I couldn’t let him kill his brother. I couldn’t let him suffer the damnation of murder I knew only too well.
“What would the boy you once were think of you now, in this very moment?”
A spasm ran through Valko’s brow. His raised hand froze, but he didn’t lower it.
“You have lost much tonight,” I rushed on. “Estengarde. Shengli. You let them go because of me, and you question it. But if the only reason you saved me”—if I could call this saved—“was so I could tell you, you don’t need to stretch from sea to sea to achieve greatness, you are enough—Riaznin is enough—then that would be well worth the price.”
I sensed my words pricking his defenses, but his rage still boiled beneath his skin. If I didn’t take care, his mood would snap again and Anton’s dagger would fly.
I needed to do something more—not seek my own emotional release, but seek the emperor’s. If the space within me wasn’t large enough to push him away, perhaps it was large enough to pull him in. If I let myself become one with his aura, could I do more? Could I inhabit his limbs, his heart, his mind? Could I finally persuade him?
Valko’s breath was hot. His knee dug into my leg and forced me flush against the wall. “You can’t tell me what I need.”
By some miracle, I felt the sudden shift in his emotion the moment before his hand came smarting down. I dove for that space inside myself, and I thrust it open. Valko permeated my aura, every quality that composed who I was—my gifts of character, the energy of my spirit, the defining fibers of my body. The serpent slithered away. It didn’t belong to the emperor. He had his own brand of darkness.
Like medicine, I sent myself back to him, back through the flowing channel between us. I felt Sestra Mirna’s long-suffering care for Yuliya in the infirmary. The hands of the Romska when they stroked my hair and tried to soothe my mad spells away. Tosya’s smile that helped me know my life wasn’t as bad as it often seemed.
My head didn’t whip to the side because Valko never struck me. His hand halted near my cheek. He swallowed, his chin quavering. “They think me incapable,” he abruptly confessed.