drops the laudanum. She twists around in the small room, scouring the dark, but cannot find its source.
“I confess, my dear, I expected more.”
The voice seems to come from every shadow—then, from one. It gathers in the darkest corner of the room, like smoke. And then he steps forward into the circle cast by the candle flame. Black curls tumble across his brow. Shadows land in the hollows of his face, and green eyes glitter with their own internal light.
And for a traitorous instant, her heart lurches at the familiar sight of her stranger, before she remembers it is only him.
The darkness from the woods.
A year she’s lived this curse, and in that time, she’s called for him. She’s pleaded with the night, sunk coins she could not spare into the banks of the Seine, begged for him to answer just so she could ask why, why, why.
Now, she throws the bottle of laudanum straight at his head.
The shadow does not move to catch it, does not need to. It passes straight through, shatters against the wall behind him. He gives her a pitying smile.
“Hello, Adeline.”
Adeline. A name she thought she’d never hear again. A name that aches like a bruise, even as her heart skips to hear it.
“You,” she snarls.
The barest incline of his head. The curl of his smile. “Have you missed me?”
She hurtles toward him like the stoppered bottle, throws herself against his front, half expecting to fall through and shatter as it did. But her hands meet flesh and bone, or at least, the illusion of it. She pounds against his chest, and it is like striking a tree, just as hard and just as pointless.
He looks down at her, amused. “I see you have.”
She tears herself away, wants to scream, to rage, to sob. “You left me there. You took everything from me, and you left. Do you know how many nights I begged—”
“I heard you,” he says, and there is an awful pleasure in the way he says it.
Addie sneers with rage. “But you never came.”
The darkness spreads his arms, as if to say, I am here now. And she wants to strike him, useless as it is, wants to banish him, cast him from this room like a curse, but she must ask. She must know. “Why? Why did you do this to me?”
His dark brows knit with false worry, mock concern. “I granted your wish.”
“I asked only for more time, for a life of freedom—”
“I have given you both.” His fingers trail along the bedpost. “This past year has taken no toll—” A stifled sound escapes her throat, but he continues. “You are whole, are you not? And uninjured. You do not age. You do not wither. And as for freedom, is there any keener liberation than what I’ve gifted you? A life with no one to answer to.”
“You know this isn’t what I wanted.”
“You did not know what you wanted,” he says sharply, stepping toward her. “And if you did, then you should have been more careful.”
“You deceived—”
“You erred,” says the darkness, closing the last space between them. “Don’t you remember, Adeline?” His voices drops to a whisper. “You were so brash, so brazen, tripping over your words as if they were roots. Rambling on about all the things you did not want.”
He is so close to her now, one hand drifting up her arm, and she wills herself not to give him the satisfaction of retreat, not to let him play the wolf, and force her into the part of sheep. But it is hard. For all that he is painted as her stranger, he is not a man. Not even human. It is only a mask, and it does not fit. She can see the thing beneath, as it was in the woods, shapeless and boundless, monstrous, and menacing. The darkness shimmers behind that green-eyed gaze.
“You asked for an eternity and I said no. You begged, and pleaded, and then, do you remember what you said?” When he speaks again, his voice is still his voice, but she can hear her own, echoing through it.
“You can have my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.”
She draws back, from the words, from him, or tries to, but this time he does not let her. The hand on her arm tightens; the other rests like a lover’s touch behind her neck.
“Was it not in my best interest, then, to make