Echo offered him a smile. “Someone’s got to keep you honest.”
She sank to her knees beside the bed, her chin coming to rest on the coverlet. One hand returned the glass of water to the nightstand, while the other splayed on the mattress beside her face. Caius remembered with sudden clarity a night that felt so long ago, when Echo had been ensconced in a pile of blankets, and he had been the one to watch over her fitful sleep. Then, her slumber had been haunted by the memory of blood freshly spilled, of a life taken in defense of his. The Avicen girl, Ruby, had been a gifted warrior, even at such a young age, but her worthiness as an adversary made her death no less tragic. One more life snuffed out before its time. One more death added to a sea of losses.
The distance between them became unbearable to Caius in that moment. Without giving himself time to consider why, exactly, what he was about to do was a bad idea, he did it.
“Come here,” he whispered, so quietly that if Echo had been any farther away she would not have heard him.
She did not move, not at first. Those soft brown eyes bored into his, searching for something he could not name. Perhaps trying to determine if this was some kind of a trick or the mumblings of an addled mind. The fingers of her left hand tightened on the coverlet, as though she were bracing herself to either walk away or heed his plea.
He would not beg. Though a small, fragmented part of him wanted to. In all his life, Caius had never, ever felt quite so wretched. His eyes drifted shut, and he told himself it was because he was terribly, viciously tired, and not because he could not bear to watch Echo retreat to her side of the room.
The mattress dipped as she sat on it.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” said Echo, wise beyond her years.
“Oh, I’m certain it’s a terrible idea,” Caius said. As if that had ever stopped them before.
The comforting silence returned, warmer now that she was next to him. Caius kept his eyes closed and drifted on the border between wakefulness and sleep. He was halfway gone when Echo spoke again, her voice pulling him back from the cliff’s edge of slumber.
“Is it me you want? Or her?”
The her required no specification.
For so long he had kept memories of Rose at a distance, as though careful avoidance could blunt their sharpened points. Only in dreams had her specter visited him, and even then, the event of her death—her murder at the hands of Tanith—loomed larger than any other memory. It eclipsed everything else. Decades had passed since that awful day, and Caius had rarely allowed himself to remember Rose as anything but the victim of his sister’s wrath.
Now, with his eyes closed and Echo beside him, he let himself remember.
The scent of her hair-feathers. Pears, it had always reminded him of. Rose had detested pears, and yet the smell of them clung to her like a stubborn perfume. He wondered how that had come about. Maybe it was an ingredient in the cleansing oil she used. He hadn’t let a single pear pass through the kitchens of Wyvern’s Keep during his reign. No one had questioned it. Every Dragon Prince had his or her peculiar quirks, and if the worst of Caius’s was an aversion to pears, well, the nobility saw fit to offer no complaints.
He remembered the way those feathers had felt slipping through his fingers, as soft as silk and surprisingly smooth. He’d expected them to feel coarser. He had touched Avicen before Rose, but only in the heat of battle. Never with tenderness. Never with a desire to touch more.
He remembered her voice, as clear as a bell and as lovely. She’d liked to sing. He would often tell her that she should have become a singer instead of a spy, and she would chuckle and claim to have no great talent for the former and an abundance for the latter. He’d found this a dubious claim, considering how terribly awry her final mission had gone. Although, since her final mission had involved seducing him, perhaps it had gone better than he’d given her credit for at the time, though he was sure that falling in love with him negated her success on that front.
Is it me you want? Or her?
Echo’s question had been laced through with insecurity that she hadn’t bothered to mask. Rose’s ghost may have visited Caius in his dreams for the better part of a century. But Echo had to live with it every day, with no reprieve on the horizon. He could understand her worry. He wondered if he would be as magnanimous if he were in her position. Probably not. But then, Echo had always been the best of them. He had known that almost immediately. Divine providence, perhaps. Or a fool’s penchant for loving impossible women.
“You,” Caius said simply. “Just you.”
He knew the words were true as he spoke them. He hadn’t been sure, not entirely, but once the proclamation had been made, it was as clear to him as a simple fact of the universe, like the sky being blue or the sun setting in the west. He had loved Rose, that was undeniable. But he had lost her. And then he had mourned her. And now, finally, after all these long years, he gave himself permission to lay her to rest.
A hand gently prodded him in the side. He opened his eyes and saw Echo gazing down at him. Her eyes shone with telltale wetness that he was too kind to point out, though he did reach up to cup her cheek, his thumb rubbing the slope of her cheekbone. She angled her head so that her lips rested on his palm. It wasn’t a kiss, but the contact sent a shiver through him.
“Scooch,” she said, lips dragging over his palm, the sensation unspeakably intimate.
Caius didn’t know what the word “scooch” meant, but he gathered that she wanted him to make room for her. And so he did, in more ways than one. Echo slid under the sheets, her legs brushing against Caius’s. Her arm wrapped around his stomach, gently, without too much pressure put on his bruises. The pain was nothing compared with the comfort of having her near. Caius drifted off to sleep, only half hearing Echo hum the melody of a lullaby he’d fallen in love with long ago.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dorian was no blushing innocent.
Though he had never been one to participate in the bawdy gossip that ran rampant in the barracks, he was no stranger to the physical intimacies that the other soldiers discussed with such careless abandon. He had simply kept his exploits to himself. He saw no reason to brag about filling a basic biological need any more than he would have gloated about satisfying his hunger with a hearty meal.