“He hurt you, didn’t he, sweetness?” she whispered fiercely, her pale eyes holding fast to mine. I could feel the outraged flare of her protection, even beneath all the love she had for him, and it was too much to keep from crying. “We aren’t meant to serve him with beauty outside of the magicked confines of that bubble kingdom; our living bodies are simply too frail to withstand the burden. So he pushed you too hard when he shouldn’t have, didn’t he, because he was eager to see how far you could go? Demanded more than you could give. Am I right?”
A tear slid hot down my cheek. “Yes. I mean, I wanted to do it—I was happy with him—but it just—”
“Let me tell you something your mother wished so desperately she could have told you, little niece.” She cupped my cheek. “Not everything is your fault. And certainly not anything he did. You don’t always need to be so brave.”
Tears stung my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Go to that boy.” She skimmed her fingers down my throat, hovering them gently above my breastbone. “Tell him what’s in there. Or what would be in there, rather, if you weren’t so hell-bent on keeping it out. There’s no need for that anymore. Not when you could have the true luxury of love.”
I’D NEVER KNOWN such a complete silence. Down by the sea, there was at least the sound of water, and from our apartment, we could always hear the faraway rush of the cars on the Adriatic Highway, the lonely bark of stray dogs, the shuffling and muffled voices of neighbors around us. But here, the hush was nearly perfect, broken only by the high skree-skree of some sole insect in the ferns. Even the birds were settling in for the approaching night.
I followed the path back to the van, my ears full of quiet and the rushing of my own blood.
He wasn’t there. “Luka?” I called out softly, counting my heartbeats in the silence. I was up to seven when he replied.
“Up here.” I followed the sound of his voice until I saw his silhouette above me against the gathering dusk. “Be careful. There’s roots, and loose stones.”
I picked my way gingerly to the incline, hauling myself up the slope toward him. The little hillock overlooked the liquid glimmer of the Black Lake below, and across from us, the great humped summit of Veliki Medjed and the triangle of Savin Kuk hulked against the purpling sky. The cherry of his cigarette flared when I reached him, and my palms tingled again. I knew he only smoked when he was unhappy.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I talk to you?”
Another smoky exhale.
“I don’t know, Iris. Is there anything to say? I’m never sure, with you.”
I placed my palm on the rough trunk of the pine between us, stroking it like a pet. “Maybe I can start, then. I know—I know you’re angry. I’m not sure why, and if you don’t want to tell me, that’s all right. But I don’t know what’s going to happen after tonight.”
Silence, but I could see him nod. I traced his chiseled profile, the well-hewn lines of nose and lips that were so delicate on Niko but fine and strong on him.
“If it didn’t work,” I continued, feeling the well of tears in my throat, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Mara will keep hunting us, and I think—I’m afraid that she might win, somehow. And if she does, I can’t let Lina go. It has to be me. I’ll go willingly, if I have to.”
“No.” The word sounded so raw it may as well have been ripped from his throat. “Lina will hate you forever if you do it.”
I shrugged, leaning my cheek against the scrape of bark. “And that’s why I’ll do it. Because she might hate me for it, but she’ll get to live. Sometimes that’s what real love takes, I guess. A sacrifice on both sides, doing for the other person what they can’t do for themselves.”
“That’s funny you should say that,” he bit off, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth. “Because I’ve been trying to love you for as long as I can remember, and you’ve never let me give you anything, no matter how much you needed it. That’s what all those flowers were for, you know? I ordered them online from a rare-flower distributor in Belgrade, I may as well tell you now. They were the only thing you’d ever take from me. I thought the price was worth it.”
I pressed my lips together. “I loved those, Luka. But they weren’t the only thing you ever gave me, please believe that. You were always there. It meant so much. It meant everything.”
“And what about now? I can’t give you anything. I can’t even put myself between you and her.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said softly, laying my palms lightly on his chest. He jerked beneath my touch, and I could feel the fire-heat of his skin beneath his shirt, and a matching, incremental melting inside me. “Just the fact that you want to is so wonderful to me. I feel like I’ve spent my whole life fighting, sometimes maybe even when I didn’t need to. But even still, why did you never try to tell me? Anything about what you felt?”
It was so hard to look at him like this, full-on and unblinking, with nowhere to hide. I’d spent so much of our time together with him by my side that I wasn’t remotely prepared for how facing him would make me quake.
“Because I didn’t want to push you into anything,” he said, eyes steady on mine. “I didn’t want you to feel like—like you owed me anything. Like you were supposed to love me just because I loved you. That’s not how it should be. That, and I deserved more, Riss, than to keep banging on the door of someone who refused to ever let me in.”
My fingers trembled against his chest, and I swallowed before I went on. “I didn’t let you in, you’re right. Not just because Mama told us both not to; obviously that never stopped Lina. It also felt safer keeping you right next to my heart, so close. Because if I let you inside, I knew the only way to ever get you out again would be to crack it all the way open. And that’s not . . .” My voice broke clean through. “That’s not something I’d survive.”
His hands crept over mine, and his palms were so warm that I couldn’t stop the tears. He gave the deepest sigh—as if he’d held that single breath for years, a genie stoppered in a bottle. His eyes glittering in the dark, he took my hands and brought them up to his face, pressed a soft kiss into the center of each of my palms. Then he cupped them over his own cheeks, so that I held his face with his hands above my hands. “So why now?” he whispered, low and rough, tilting his forehead until it met mine. “Why tell me now?”
“Because if it turns out I have to be the one to go, I can’t”—I choked back a barbed sob—“I can’t do it unless you know I do love you, too.”
I hadn’t been prepared for the fierceness, either. Over the years, I’d thought about how this might go—of course I had—but the scenarios I’d played out had been tender, coaxing, and cautious.
Instead, Luka slid his hands up my arms and spun us around, pressing my back hard against the trunk. I opened my mouth to gasp and he covered it with his own, lips warm and expert as they caught mine. He tasted so good, sweetness and salt with that slight, smoky underlay of tobacco. I sighed into his mouth, hands sliding up his chest to wind around his neck. He caught them and pinned them above my head, one hand wrapped around my wrists. I pressed against his grip despite myself.