Chapter 33: A Letter Never Sent
I did not mean to do it.
The words came out of me like the blood would come out of a wound, immediate and unstoppable. No choice, no decision. Only a tempest in my breast to vent somewhere and the silence of my apartments invited to be broken.
The quill shook in my hand as I dipped it into the ink. Moonlight flooded across the desk, silver and icy, lighting the empty parchment as if already aware of some idea of what I was to admit.
I hesitated only once before I set the first letter.
Kael.
Not Your Highness. Not My Lord. Just. Kael. The name I'd spoken against my lips while sleeping I'd never heard. The name I'd cursed when the pain had been too much to endure. The name I'd prayed—and threatened.
I sat and gazed at it.
Then started writing.
I don't think you'll ever get to read this.
I don't know if I will ever be stupid—or stupid enough to let you. But I must say this, somewhere. Even if words are drowned in the darkness.
When your fingers touched me that night under attack, only your fingers had not mended me. Something had. Something I do not even know that I can describe. Something that filled me with fear more than the blood and the hurt, or the cold of the Court's eyes.
You looked at me as if I were something.
As you saw me—not as a blood donor, not as a threat or consent—but as a woman. As a human being. And for that fleeting instant, I did. Thought it. Thought you.
But believing is perilous, isn't it?
You speak to me with lips that I am nothing, that I'm property, that I don't belong. Your eyes, though, do not. Your hands, no. Your hands speak a language of hunger, of yearning, of restraint so tight it burns.
Which one is true?
I can no longer be torn between your silence and your shadowed love.
So… I've made up my mind.
If ever I get the chance, I'm leaving.
Not because I despise you.
But because to stay would kill the rest of me that I still recognize.
My hand stopped on its way. I stared at the letter, chest heaving as if it'd run a mile through woodlands. Ink hadn't yet set, the letter glowing pale blue in moonlight.
They talked unnaturally but somehow recognizable too.
I folded the letter carefully, ironing out the creases into stiff pleats as if that would be sufficient to compensate for how little I had done with my own heart. I stood up and stepped over to the wardrobe.
There, behind a pile of fallen gray dresses, was a cavity in the rear panel—undetectable unless you knew the secret. A vacant board, taken out days earlier in a fit of restive curiosity.
I placed the letter in the cavity.
And covered it up.
As a secret. As a wound.
As love is never spoken.
The next morning,
The Court buzzed once more. Some sort of alliance to the palace clan, some sort of conflict in the north, some sort of foreign bloodlines too close to palace doors.
None of it.
I heard only footsteps. His. Down the corridor. Loitering at my door, waiting—
And disappeared once more.
He did not appear before me that evening. Not to speak, not to do, not even to chastise.
And without him, my mind strayed to things that I should not desire.
His lips are on mine.
His voice, my name on his lips, a prayer.
His weight on mine in the dark—not with hatred, but need. As if I were something he couldn't possibly bring himself to kill completely.
But that Kael only in secret rooms we never discussed. In stolen moments. In the dark.
The true Kael still occupied the throne.
To duty.
To another.
And I was but the mortal maiden he'd seized by error.
Two days had passed.
Then three.
I wouldn't eat in the great hall. I wouldn't sit by the door.
But I couldn't escape the hurt.
So I stayed busy with whatever was available. Cleaning. Reading. Even running errands for the servants just to keep out the crushing quiet.
I was there, one night, in the garden again. My sanctuary, even after he'd attacked me.
The roses had burst under the spring moon—velvet red, deep red, fragile, and potent. I touched the end of one and was shocked at the beauty still existing even here, even amidst brutality.
Even amidst him.
"Scarlett."
My muscles braced.
That voice.
Low. I knew it. Shameless in how much I'd come to require it.
I turned, a war drum beating in the back of my ribs.
Kael was at the end of the garden path, moonlight tracing silver in the creases of his cheeks, his golden eyes burning hotter than they should.
"I shouldn't be here," he said, as though he apologized. As though it were something.
"Then why are you?"
He approached me. "I thought I was being clear."
"You were," I said, my words pinched with held-back tears. "Crystal."
He blushed.
"I'm trying to rescue you," he said. "From me. From here. From… everything."
"You can't save someone and kill them simultaneously, Kael."
He stepped back as if I'd slapped him.
We stood there in silence, wrapped in something too painful to say.
I never mentioned the letter.
I never mentioned accepting to leave.
Because there are certain things, even now, I wished he'd doubt.
Let him question whether or not I loved him.
Let him question whether or not I would stay.
Let him feel what I would feel with every departure.
And perhaps one day, years after my death, he'll find the letter.
Perhaps he'll read the words that I never uttered.
And perhaps by that point, it will be too late.
To be continued…