it chokes me to death.
“And my father,” he continues on a rasp, “he was never the sort to tell anyone no. Princess Evangeline was dead, and the king’s sanity balanced on a tightrope made of steel knives. But still I begged and still Pa brought me.” His lids flick open and he twists his head to pin those eerie green-yellow eyes on me. “They argued from the start. Angry words that made me wish I were anywhere else but in that room. I said nothing, barely breathed. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d made all the noise in the world because John, he—Christ.”
My throat works with a rough swallow. “You’re alive.”
“What?”
“It’s what I tell myself,” I say, tangling my fingers before me, “when the anxiety spikes. I’m alive.”
The chiseled line of his jaw stiffens. “I don’t have anxiety.”
“Then why are your hands trembling?”
As if in doubt, Saxon splays his palms open and lifts them to chest-level. Even from where I stand, there’s no mistaking their visible tremor. Slowly, as though embarrassed by his body’s betrayal, he curls those lean fingers inward and clenches them into fists.
“You’re not a block of ice, Saxon, no matter how much you might wish that you were.” I keep my tone level, though it’s a struggle to sound unaffected. In the deepest part of my heart, I want to beg for him to open this door—not to escape, but so that I might wrap my arms around him and soothe his battered soul. Pitiful, absolutely pitiful. “It’s human to feel.”
“Until you, it was never a problem.”
“That’s not fair.” Frustration restricts my lungs, squeezing tight. “You can’t throw that accusation at my feet, like it’s my fault that you aren’t . . . that you aren’t some emotionless robot!”
“Bloody hell, Isla, I didn’t know what I was missing!” He storms toward my prison cage, not stopping until his hot breath mists the door, he stands so close. His eyes are turbulent, wild. “I drowned every bit of me that day. He held me down. Kept me fucking strapped to that chair while my father watched, utterly useless to save me.”
Heat, the sort that always foreshadows the arrival of something bad, warms my skin to a feverish pitch. “What did he do?”
“He branded me.”
“I-I don’t understand. How—where—?”
His fingers drift north to find the shell of his ear before tracing the sensitive flesh behind his lobe. Exactly where he flinched when I touched him, days ago.
My heart thunders as he husks, “There’s a certain level of fear that comes with pain, no matter the age. Broken bones. Torn ligaments. But there’s something to be said about when you realize, even at a young age, that power is the most frightening thing of all. The king’s power kept my father silent. The king’s power meant I would not have gotten away with fleeing, if I’d even had the chance. And then the king turned the power he wielded into a lesson by carving my Holyrood code into my skin.”
A horrified gasp escapes me before I can smother the sound.
“Pa was dead within months,” Saxon continues, without outward inflection, dropping his hand to his side. “We suspect on John’s order but we’ll never know for certain.”
“How could you”—I shake my head, trying to find the right words for a situation that is all so wrong—“how could you stay working for that man, knowing what he did to you? What he did to your father?”
“Because Paris showed me a different type of fear.” He runs his tongue along the ragged perimeter of his upper lip. “For our safety, we were exiled. Whether that was the actual truth or not mattered little. We had nothing. We were nothing. Begging for scraps, stealing whatever we could. It was brutal. Hopeless. Holyrood sent us money, but it never went as far as it should have, not with Mum sick and hospital bills eating every last quid we had—we didn’t exist, not on paper.”
Realization spreads through my veins like liquid truth. “So you wanted power. Returning to Holyrood gave you that.”
He holds my gaze, never once looking away. “I wanted a life where death sat around every corner.”
“Why?” I demand, flushed with confusion. “Why in the world would you want that for yourself?”
“It was the only time that I didn’t feel numb.”
Until you.
He doesn’t say the words out loud, but I hear them anyway. Stark and raw and real.
My lids fall shut.
There is so much to say and yet nothing can overrule one single, sobering