Page 22 of Ravished By the Revenant

“Naturally.” He sits and unfolds his napkin like a man raised by nannies with switches. “Eat, Clara.”

I eat, and it’s the best fish I’ve ever had. The skin crackles, the flesh is butter-soft and lemony, and I make a sound on the first bite that I would deny in court.

Aldric’s fork pauses halfway to his mouth.

“Don’t,” I warn him around a mouthful.

“I said nothing.”

“I can feel the laser beam from your weird eyeball.”

For once, he doesn’t ask me what the hell I’m talking about. He eats, watching me eat, which should be creepy but instead makes me feel seen. When my plate is empty, he disappears and returns with a bowl of strawberries and a small pitcher of cream. It’s thick and fresh, and for the first time in my life, I know the cow that produced the milk it’s made from. He pours it over the berries himself and slides the bowl in front of me.

Strawberries. Like the tray beside the bath. Like last night with his fingers, his mouth, the sound he made when⁠—

I shove a strawberry in my mouth. He’s watching my lips. I’m watching him watch my lips. The candles I lit for purely functional purposes are doing romantic things to his cheekbones, and the room is getting smaller, and if I don’t change the subject right now, I’m going to end up begging exactly the way he predicted, and I will have to walk into the lake.

“So,” I say, too loud. “The curse.”

Aldric leans back. His face goes blank. “What of it?”

“The witch. Walk me through it. What exactly did she say to you?”

“That I would languish unchanged for eternity, confined to this castle while everyone around me dies.” He recites it with a flat voice.

“Okay, but the servants could leave. So the curse has exceptions. Rules. Rules can be exploited…” I tap a finger against my lips. “Did she say anything about how it ends? In all the stories I’ve read, curses always have an out. A loophole, a condition, true love’s—” I stop before finishing that sentence. “A condition.”

“She said nothing of an end.” His voice is bitter. “We searched, Clara. I searched. My servants brought scholars’ letters, occultists’ books, spiritualists’ texts. There is no loophole. There is only the boundary, and me inside it.”

“But I got in,” I argue. “That’s new data. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It means something is different about you.” His eye lifts to mine, and the shard glows beside it, twin points of blue. “I have not yet determined what.”

“Then let’s determine it! Let’s go back to the library, let’s read the ledger, let’s… I don’t know. Let’s test the gate at different times, retrace exactly how I came in⁠—”

“To what end?” His voice stays level, which is somehow worse than shouting. “So you may find the crack in my prison and slip out of it?”

“So we may find the crack and both get out, you absolute gargoyle.” I drop my spoon into the cream with a clatter. “This is the part where a normal person says ‘great idea, Clara, I too would like to leave my haunted terrarium.’”

“Hope is not a kindness to a man like me,” he says, and each word comes out colder. “I have buried it more times than I have buried servants. Forgive me if I decline to exhume it because a beautiful woman found my gate unlocked.”

“That’s—” Beautiful. He just slid that in there like an athlete slides into a model’s DMs. I refuse to let it sway me. “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard, and I once watched the Titanic sink in 3D.”

Aldric growls, the sound pure frustration. “I do not know what any of that means.”

“It means you’d rather keep the one interesting thing that’s happened to you in a century locked in your terrarium than risk finding out the door might open!” I’m standing now. My chair scrapes back, and my hands are flat on his ancient table. “You know what? Great dinner. Ten out of ten fish. Terrible everything else.”

I snatch a last strawberry out of the cream—because I’m furious, not stupid—and march for the stairs. Shmoo joins me, materializing at my ankles and escorting me like a tiny bailiff.

“Clara.”

I don’t stop. “Goodnight, Lord Broods-a-lot.”

“Clara.” His voice rolls down the hall after me, all battlefield general. “If you insist on commandeering the master bedroom I have slept in for centuries, you could at least do me the courtesy of sharing my bed with me!”

I stop on the third stair. Turn. He’s standing at the end of the hall, candlelight behind him, all broad shoulders and creepy blue glow and nerve.

“That,” I call back, “is the worst invitation I have ever received, and my last one came with a mafia ring.”