Page 94 of Revenant

“You’re still breathing, aren’t you?” The cruelty behind my words is deliberate. I need her to be angry. Angry is safer than whatever pity she was feeling two seconds ago, looking at me like she could possibly understand what heartbreak it is I went through. “Consider it a compliment.”

“A compliment. You’re fucking joking.” She exhales a short, disbelieving breath through her nose, her tongue pressing briefly into her cheek like she’s physically biting back something worse.

“I never joke.”

She opens her mouth then closes it. Something changes in her expression—the fight still there but losing ground to something she hasn’t decided what to do with yet. Her eyes move past my shoulder, and I watch the anger drain out of her slowly. She’s looking at the place where Veil was sitting—the bay window now nothing but a pale suggestion at the edge of the darkness.

Her hand comes up slowly, fingertips brushing her jaw without seeming to realize she’s doing it.

“I really do look like her,” she says softly, returning her gaze to mine.

“Nearly identical.” The admission tastes like gravel.

Her eyes cut back to mine. “Nearly?”

I should not answer that.

“Your freckles are different.”

The silence that follows is enormous, and I watch her absorb it—the intimacy of it, that I looked closely enough to know the difference between her face and a dead woman’s.

“You loved her.”

“No. I thought I loved her.”

Alicent tips her head. Studying me. “You can tell yourself that if it’s easier. But what I saw—” Her voice stays impossibly, infuriatingly gentle. “Was an entirely different person, you—”

Something cold moves through me.

“Go back to sleep, little wraith.”

“I don’t think that’s how this works.”

It isn’t, but she doesn’t need to know that. So instead, I leave.

The dream collapses behind me like a building with the supports kicked out—and I leave her alone in the dark with a memory that was never hers to keep.

I jerk upright in my bed, sweat clings to my brow from the memory of Alicent in my dream. My hands scrub down my face, eyes pinching shut. It wasn’t a dream.

It was a bloody nightmare.

This has never happened before. In all my centuries, no one has ever entered my dreamscape so carelessly as though they’re merely walking through the quad. Alicent doesn’t possess such power, and I guess a small part of my subconscious yearned for her to witness what was the start of my downfall.

It’s unnerving to say the least.

I wonder if it woke her up as it did me. Curiosity gets the better of me and I find myself glancing at the clock. There’s a small window of time where she’ll be alone—vulnerable. The guys have her on a pathetic rotating schedule, always one of them by her side to keep her safe.

Safe from me.

The notion that I would actually cause harm to her is ludicrous. I may have fed from her, but the turmoil that would have unfolded had I not would’ve been catastrophic.

Quickly getting dressed, I listen carefully beside my door, making sure Elias’s footsteps fall well past the end of the hall.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where she was staying tonight. My little wraith isn’t exactly quiet when in the thralls of my brother’s bed.

Once I’m confident Elias won’t be turning back, I move from my room to his in just a matter of seconds. Normally, I wouldn’t be so careful, worried they would find me. But given recent events, they’ve made it perfectly clear where I stand as of right now.

I can’t entirely blame them either.