Page 109 of Heartbreak Prince

“Very well.” The Stewardess sounds relieved. “I’ll have that fire put out at once.”

Vawn’s suite is small and unkempt, but less suffocatingly full of objects, and there’s a long sofa which Inaya promises to have made up as a bed. I pretend not to notice the small white head and beady eyes of an ice-rat poking out of a sofa cushion.

“Get some rest if you can,” says the Stewardess. “Please ring the bell by the door if you need anything. If it’s in my power to give, I will provide it.”

“Thank you,” Vawn and I say in unison, and the Stewardess smiles a little as she steps out and closes the door.

I stand still, eyes wide, staring at Vawn. Without speaking, he takes out the flask and offers it to me again.

This time, I drink.

22

A few hours of sleep on Vawn’s bed, tucked against his side, is exactly what I needed. By the time the servants show up at the door of the suite, ready to help us prepare for the feast, I’m feeling alert and refreshed.

Vawn, on the other hand, seems gloomier than ever.

“The drink has left me, and there’s no more in my flask,” he mutters.

“You can have wine at dinner,” I tell him. “You need to get up.”

He moves a little, heavily, as if something is weighing his body down. Instead of rising, he rolls onto his side with a groan.

I turn to the servants. “Thank you for your help, but please leave us for now. I will ring if we need you.”

Once they’re gone, I whirl back to the prince. “You can’t lie here. You must attend the feast.”

“Fuck the feast,” he mumbles into the pillow. “Fuck this hideous hole of a rat-riddled palace. Fuck everything.”

I march around to the side of the bed, preparing to chide him for his childish attitude—but then I spot the dark stains on his pillow, where tears have washed the black paint from around his eyes onto the pale fabric.

While I was sleeping, he was crying.

Dropping to my knees, I touch his face. “I shouldn’t have slept. I didn’t know you were hurting like this.”

“You needed the rest,” he says. “I’m glad you were able to sleep.”

“Tell me what I can do. How can I help you?”

He raises an eyebrow slightly.

“Your lower glyphs.” I wince. “You want to activate them.”

“Only a few. Just for tonight. This place is bad for me, Syth. It saps every bit of humor and hope from my body. Can you feel the rot and the ruin and the sadness? This is a dark hovel, a tomb of excess. It is a place of slow, perpetual death. These people are death, and their promises are death—” He puts his face into the pillow and roars, a muffled bellow of agony so deep that I feel the echo of it in my bones.

I place my hand on his back, rubbing in slow circles. “I’m here.”

Vawn lifts his tearstained face from the pillow. “I should never have let you come along.”

“Let me?” I smirk. “Did you really have a choice?”

He doesn’t smile. There’s a depth in his eyes that I haven’t seen before—an unending void. The darkness that follows him like an assassin he can never escape.

A wave of emotion floods my soul—sympathy, longing, and the ache of helplessness because I cannot save him from an enemy in his mind.

Rising on my knees beside the bed, I press my lips to his.

It’s a brief, soft kiss that tastes like tears. When I draw back and look into his eyes, shock has replaced the darkness, and there’s a glimmer of hunger in his gaze.