Maybe he wanted to kiss her. Maybe this was a good moment. Maybe the more she stood there, silent and still, the further away the moment got. Ivy knew, distantly, that something in her brain had short-circuited.
“We shouldn’t,” Helios said, making absolutely no attempt to move away. Ivy’s heart didn’t plummet, it only sank a little.
“Yeah,” she agreed, not meaning it at all. “Probably not.”
With painful slowness, Helios began extricating himself from her. She tightened her grip on his hand as she spoke. “Except…”
“Yes?”
“We could die tomorrow.”
He nodded. “Very true.”
Ivy swallowed. Her throat was very dry. As if she hadn’t just drunk one and a half bottles of water. “Please.”
Another nod. “As you wish.”
Helios inclined his head as Ivy rose up on her toes. He brought their clasped hands up between them so that he was supporting her weight against his chest. When his lips brushed hers, she thought she might explode in a fury of feathers and flame.
Ivy had always wondered what the big deal was. Now she knew.
Kissing Helios was nothing like what she had imagined. And, oh, how she had imagined it. It wasn’t passionate and demanding, as it had been in her fantasies. It was sweet. And soft. And she never, ever wanted it to stop.
His hands came to rest on her hips, tentatively, as if unsure of their welcome. She took a tiny step forward, closing the already slim distance between their bodies. Helios was warm, like the comforting heat of a roaring fire.
Ivy didn’t know what to do with her hands. They fluttered at her sides before moving of their own accord, first to skim the fine bones of Helios’s wrists, then over the corded muscles of his forearms, around the curves of his elbows. Her hands paused on the swell of his biceps. That was a fine place to leave them.
His mouth slid away from hers. He placed a light kiss against the corner of her lips, then another one on her cheek, right below her eye. When she blinked, she could feel her eyelashes brushing against his skin. She had never been more aware of her body than at that moment.
Teeth scraped her bottom lip, and all rational thought fled.
Far too soon, Helios pulled away, his golden eyes glazed over.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” Ivy replied, blinking away her stupor.
So that was what all the fuss was about.
He smiled, and it was such a lovely smile Ivy wanted to smack it off his face. No one should smile like that. It should be illegal.
“I’m going to go find a shower,” he said.
Oh. That wasn’t a visual she was going to complain about. Ever.
She watched him leave, her heart drumming an irregular beat inside her chest. She was finally beginning to understand why people got so stupid around people they liked. Wiping the sweat from her brow, she left the room, pointedly choosing the opposite direction from the one Helios had taken. If she followed him, she couldn’t trust what she might do. If they lived through this, there would be time enough for that nonsense. If they lived through this. It was a sobering thought, but not even the notion that death might find them tomorrow was enough to dispel the effervescent cloud of joy that enveloped Ivy all the way to her room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Echo rolled the tin of healing balm Ivy had given her between her palms. The metal was cold against her skin, and its contents would remain solid until her body heat warmed them up. She felt her cheeks redden as she remembered the conspiratorial look on Ivy’s face when she had pressed the tin into Echo’s hands and said, “For the wounds on his back. You’ll enjoy applying it more than I would.”
And that was why Echo found herself standing in front of the door to the room that Caius had claimed for himself. She had just raised her fist to knock when she heard an indistinct curse come from the other side of the door. She didn’t know what exactly Caius had said, but she knew that it was in Drakhar and that he sounded like he was in pain.
Echo pushed open the door and poked her head inside. “Everything all right?”
Laughter bubbled up in her throat at what she saw.
Caius was trapped inside his sweater.
His raised arms were held captive by the sleeves, and his voice was muffled by a layer of wool over the lower half of his face. “Everything is perfectly fine.”
That he managed to deliver such a statement with unflagging dignity was impressive in its own right. He turned away from Echo as he attempted to extract himself from the sweater, and her laughter came to an abrupt halt.
She understood then how he had become entangled in his own clothing. The angry welts on his back had scabbed over, but the scabbing had tightened the skin. Caius’s movements were restricted lest he open the healing wounds and start them bleeding anew.
He paused when he noticed Echo’s silence. “Is it that bad?”
Echo nodded before realizing he couldn’t see it. “Yeah,” she said. “It looks even worse now than it did when…”
When she had found Caius, chained up and left for dead by Tanith. The remainder of her sentence went unspoken. Some things didn’t bear repeating, not when the wounds were—literally—so fresh.
“Let me help you,” said Echo. That was why she had come to find him, after all.
Caius did not protest as she gently liberated his arms from their woolen prison. As carefully as she could, she slipped the sweater over his head, wincing in sympathy as he let out another string of Drakhar curses. She understood a few of them from the handful of profane phrases Dorian had taught her during their time in hiding. Some of them were truly filthy.
“I’m shocked and appalled to find a prince with such a deplorable potty mouth,” she said, feeling neither shocked nor appalled.
His laugh was laced with a twinge of lingering pain. “I was a soldier before I was elected prince,” he said. “You learn all the best turns of phrase in the barracks, I assure you.”
He stood before her, bare-chested, without the slightest hint of self-consciousness. It wasn’t until he cleared his throat that Echo realized she had been staring.
Heat crept up the back of her neck as she pulled her gaze away from the expanse of tanned skin in front of her. She looked up and found Caius looking back at her, his green eyes dark. A slight but undeniable smirk danced at the corners of his lips. She wanted to insist that it wasn’t simply his physique that had overwhelmed her. The long red scars that crisscrossed his torso were hypnotic in their awfulness. But her momentary lapse seemed to amuse him, and it would have been unkind to tell him she was gawking at the evidence of his sister’s cruelty. That was what Echo told herself as she held up the tin of healing balm like a shield between them.
“I got this from Ivy,” she said. “It’s for your back.” And your front.
Caius plucked the tin from her hands and opened it. He sniffed the gelatinous goo inside. “Not bad,” he said. “These things tend to have a rather unappealing odor about them.”
“It’s the crushed mint,” Echo supplied. “Ivy uses it to mask the stench.”
Caius hummed in agreement. “Will you help me put it on?”