Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 156907 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 785(@200wpm)___ 628(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156907 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 785(@200wpm)___ 628(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
I felt my skin start to burn.
“I’m seeing you did not come up here to share your regret at your behavior toward me that set this off between us,” I noted.
“My behavior?” he demanded.
“Did you hear a word I said during our quarrel?” I asked.
“Oh yes, Silence,” he whispered sinisterly. “Some are still ringing in my ears.”
I stared at him.
And then I whispered in return (though, not sinisterly, disbelievingly), “You are angry with me.”
“What gave you that impression?” he asked sarcastically.
“There was not a hint of love…in that house…from him, to me,” I said deliberately slowly.
“And yet you compared him to me,” he clipped.
“There was not…a hint of love…in that house…from him…to me.”
Everything that was Mars went completely inert.
I sensed this.
I even saw it.
But I did not register it.
“And she only gave me what she could get away with giving.”
“Silence.”
“I am wrong.”
“What are you wrong about?” he asked quietly.
His question drifted right through me as if it had not been asked.
“I am wrong. I am not right. I am a bluestocking.”
“Bellezza—”
“The Mouse. Incidental. Useless.”
One of his fists went out of the settee so he could curve his hand under my jaw.
“My love, focus on me.”
“Back there, I would have lived in my shadow if I could. Not to be seen. Not to be known. Nothing expected of me. No one to disappoint. My shadow was everything to me. It was my saving grace. If I had not had it, I would have gone quite mad.”
“Gods damn it,” he murmured, shifting as if he would take me into his arms.
But I shoved against him and scuttled away, shouting, “No!”
I nearly tripped over my skirt as I made my feet.
I then whirled to him, backing away.
He had straightened and was facing me.
“I would wish you to come to me, my Silence,” he urged softly.
“And all this time I was not even his?” I asked.
His voice had changed to one I had never heard when he repeated, “Silence, I wish you to come to me.”
“I know why I have my shadow now, Mars,” I informed him. “I have come to understand it. I understand why I can disappear into nothing. This is because I was never even meant to be.”
“You were.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were, mia bellezza.”
I leaned toward him, emotion bubbling up in me, boiling me from the inside, and I screeched, “I wasn’t!”
He came at me then, and I struggled, I fought.
I did this because I had to flee, I did not know to where.
All I knew was I had to flee.
“I will not fight you, amore, but I will subdue you,” Mars said, doing just that. “But I do not wish to hurt you as I do, so please, calm for me.”
Abruptly, I did as he asked, finding myself caught tight in his arms.
I looked up to see his face, awash with concern, staring down at me.
“I believed,” I told him.
“What is it you believed?” he asked.
“That he…that he…that there was something there for him with me.”
“It is not your burden he is a revolting man.”
Again, I spoke like Mars hadn’t.
“All this time, all these years, I wanted there to be.”
“Of course you did, you were a daughter and you thought he was your father.”
“All these years, he made me feel like nothing, when he was.”
“Yes,” Mars said firmly. “Yes, Silence, it was he who is nothing.”
“But he made me feel like nothing.”
“Fuck,” he bit. “I did not mean to make you feel that way, my love.”
“He made me feel like nothing.”
“Silence.”
“Nothing.”
“Piccolina.”
“A shadow,” I whispered, right before I dissolved into tears.
I would have collapsed in his arms, but he lifted me up in them instead, and he carried me to our bed.
There, he entered it, holding me close, and he continued to do so as I wept into his skin.
I did not want to feel this.
I did not want to give my father this.
But I could not seem to stop.
Mars tutted and stroked my hair and back and held me tight, altering this with rocking me like a baby.
And moments before I cried myself to sleep, I heard my husband say, “Your shadow is not nothing, my queen. You were right. It is a gift. And the gods do not grant something this important, this beautiful to someone who is nothing.”
King Mars
The King’s Study, East Wing, Catrame Palace, Fire City
FIRENZE
Lorenz arrived in Mars’s study looking alert even if it was late and Mars was certain his call took his captain from his bed.
And it was a bed Lorenz was also late to, Mars knew, for they had had a very long discussion about things they were learning from the Go’Ella. None of it about The Rising, but none of it was good. This happening after he had scraped off Ines which was soon after Silence had left them.
He did not see Lorenz directly.