Page 28 of The Half King
She wanted to press for more than a halfhearted try, but his hand dissolved into shadow, and he slipped like an onyx breeze through her fingers. The last parts of him to vanish were his eyes, round and unblinking and filled with a hundred silent pleas that rang louder than a thunderclap inside her head.
Don’t leave me stranded and alone. Don’t give up on me. Don’t fail.
Those eyes imprinted on hers and lingered long after they were gone.
7
Cerise.
The whisper tickled her inner ear, rousing her from dreams.
Wake up, Cerise.
She batted at the sound.
Wake up!
She came to with a gasp, whipping her gaze around her bedchamber for the owner of the voice. Much like her previous nights in the palace, only darkness surrounded her, the deep black that came before dawn. But as the haze of slumber faded, she detected a slight difference in the air. A scent that didn’t belong. Sniffing again, she realized—it was smoke.
She scrambled out of bed, ran through her suite, and continued all the way into the lamp-lit corridor, not bothering to change out of her nightshirt. She knew there were no hearths in Mortara outside of the kitchens, so if there was a fire in the palace, it wasn’t the good kind.
She called out, “Fire!”
When no one responded, she remembered that the other suites along her corridor were empty. A tint clung to the air, growing thicker at the opposite end of the hallway. The source of the fire was close. Even though the king had dismissed his court, maybe a visitor had arrived during the night and was trapped inside a burning room.
Cerise followed the trail of smoke until she reached a suite with blackened fumes pouring from underneath the door. Again, she shouted, “Fire!”
This time, someone heard her call. A royal guard rounded the corner at the other end of the hallway. He saw the smoke and ran toward her, but as he approached, his footsteps slowed and grew clumsy. He made it within ten paces of her before he dropped to his knees and collapsed onto the floor. A moment later, two more guards rounded the corner, but both of them tripped over their boots and crumpled, unconscious, beside the first man.
Cerise shook the guards’ shoulders, but she couldn’t rouse them. Since it was clear that no one else was coming to help her, she used the back of her hand to test the doorknob’s temperature. The metal was only warm to the touch, so she opened the door and immediately cringed as heat tightened her skin.
She dropped to her knees, scanning below the smoke. She identified two more unconscious guards on the suite floor. In the adjoining bedchamber, a woman was slumped halfway over the mattress as though she had lost consciousness while trying to escape. The source of the fire was contained near the balcony, where flames engulfed the curtains. The fire hadn’t spread to the furniture or the carpets yet, but it would if she didn’t extinguish it soon.
She crouched low and darted into the room. Smoke stung her eyes and blurred her vision. Blinking furiously, she snatched the blanket off of the bed and used it to bat at the curtains. The gauzy fabric disintegrated into spirals of ash, which she then smothered with the blanket before she pushed open both balcony doors to clear the smoke.
With the flames extinguished, she pulled in a cool lungful of air, then another. Had a breeze ever tasted this good? A gentle wind swirled inside the suite, pushing the smoke out of the opposite doorway and into the hall. Cerise blotted her eyes with her nightshirt and turned in a clumsy circle to survey the damage.
Numbly, she took in the room, feeling like a spectator in someone else’s dream: debris scattered everywhere, chairs overturned, the blood-orange glow of sunrise on the horizon, the murky cloud that tumbled through the balcony doors. But when the cloud blew back her loose hair, smelling of clean, male skin, she realized what she was witnessing.
The king had arrived.
She watched a ball of shadow gather at the foot of the bed and materialize into flesh. The king’s feet appeared first, long and bronze, followed so quickly by a pair of lean calves and muscular thighs that before her heart could finish its beat, Kian was fully formed.
And completely naked.
Her breath caught. She knew that she should look away, but her eyes only widened to take in more of him. She had never seen a man’s body—not like this—and she found herself captivated by the dusting of hair that covered his skin. Dark and glossy, the king’s curls were sparse in some places, like along the contours of his chest, but they converged at his abdomen and led south, where they encircled his navel and formed a thick trail that drew her focus between his hips.
Oh, stars.
Cheeks heating, she jerked her gaze to his face.
Thankfully, the king hadn’t noticed her watching him. He glanced around the room and muttered, “What in damnation?” until he caught sight of Cerise’s bare legs and arched a brow. “My lady of the temple, you are not dressed.”
She studied the carpet at his feet. “Neither are you, Your Highness.”
There was a rustle of fabric as he ripped the top sheet from the bed and wrapped it around his waist. “My apologies. I don’t suppose priests flaunt their nudity at the temple.”
“Only the toddlers,” she said to the floor. “They remove their clods every chance they get.”
