Kingdom of Sea and Stone (Crown of Coral and Pearl #2) - Mara Rutherford Page 0,109

it looks beautiful on you.”

I could feel something thrumming in my veins, like the distant crash of waves on shore, a sound I’d only heard briefly in my life. Ceren went back to his seat, still gazing at me intently. The servants stood like statues against the walls, clearly under Ceren’s control, their bloodstones pulsating in a slow, rhythmic beat, in time with my heart. I wondered if they felt the same warm rush of blood through their bodies that I did, as if there were a dozen hearts in my chest, instead of one.

“Nor.”

The voice sounded far away. I struggled to focus on it.

Ceren was smiling at me. “It takes a bit of getting used to, I know.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it. “What are you doing, Ceren?”

His long, pale fingers were reaching across the table for mine, and it was as if I was watching from above, no longer in my own body. “I thought you hated me when you stabbed me in the crypt. I was going to find you and kill you no matter what it took. But then the visions started, and I saw your memories of what you went through as a child. I started to realize that we weren’t so different after all. I was wrong to try to force you to marry me. I knew it then. But I didn’t believe there was any other way.”

The pleasant buzz in my head was beginning to recede, replaced by a sick feeling in my stomach. “Ceren—”

“You wouldn’t have come back if you hated me, Nor.”

It was an effort not to close my eyes and succumb to that lovely thrumming in my veins. “I didn’t come back willingly,” I whispered. “You forced me.”

His fingers circled my wrist, immediately finding my pulse. Whatever he found there seemed to satisfy him. “I was so relieved when you returned. I hated seeing you weak and starving in the dungeons.” His eyes met mine. “I hope you know that I would do anything for you, Nor. I would give you the blood in my veins, if I thought it would help.”

Something about his words cut through the fog in my mind. Moving was like struggling against a tide, but I forced myself to my feet.

Sit down, Nor.

It was a command, not a request. He was trying to control me with the bloodstone, despite his promise. But if he was using the same force on me as he did everyone else, it wasn’t having the desired effect. I reached up to my neck and fumbled at the chain, searching vainly for the clasp with numb fingers.

“Don’t you understand?” I asked, though my voice sounded slurred in my head. “This isn’t how it works. You can’t force someone to love you.”

“You think I don’t know that? If I could, Talia would have loved me like the mother I never had. Instead, she despised me.”

It was easy to think of him as the same Ceren I’d known before, weakened by the mountain. But he loomed above me, a mountain in his own right. I could see the frustration on his face as I began backing toward the exit, as if he was mentally commanding me to stop. But his voice in my head was nothing but a low buzz, and with every step, I pushed it farther away.

Some of the feeling was coming back into my limbs. I glanced around at the guards, but they were still frozen in place. Two stood before the exit, blocking my escape route.

“So you attempted to kill Talia for not loving you?” I asked, trying to distract Ceren from controlling his men. He may not be able to stop me with his mind, but Ceren was still physically capable of overpowering me.

“I lived with that woman for years knowing she despised me. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, everything could have gone on that way forever.”

I stared at him, my mouth open as I searched for words. “So you decided to kill your own sibling? You didn’t even know it was a daughter.”

“Talia always knew it was a girl. And whether or not anyone else would believe that girl had a legitimate claim to the throne over me, my father would have. He was always going to choose Talia over me.”

He had stepped within a foot of me, and though he towered over me, I could still see the broken child in his eyes, begging to be accepted and finding nothing but rejection. I could