Chapter 65: A Decade of Absence (2)
We move through the city, streets narrowing as the fog thickens around us, morning creeping in quiet, cyan light. The houses are tall, packed close like conspirators, their rooftops meeting the sky in uneven silhouettes. The color isn’t quite right here—less vibrant than it would be somewhere else.
She shifts, trying to see something ahead, and I throw her a little higher to adjust my grip. That’s when I feel it. Something cold smacks against my head and begins to slide down my temple in a sticky, humiliating mess.
“I–sorry––” she mumbles, voice tiny. I hear the real meaning anyway. She’s not sorry for me. She’s sorry for the ice cream, now in ruins on the cobblestones.
“Your ice cream, huh?” I mutter. She’s still perched on my shoulders like she belongs there.
I’m wearing a different face again today. I always change my appearance. Now I look like them: one of the stoic blue-blooded. Long blond hair falling to my shoulders, a nobleman’s severe expression carved onto my face. My eyes match their cold-blooded heritage. I hate this mask. I hate how it lets them see me as one of their own while she, with her brand, is marked as mine. As property.
I see the way they look at us. The sneers half-hidden behind polite disgust. The glances that linger on her neck. I want to snarl at them all, but I can’t. Too many witnesses. I carefully lift her off my shoulders and set her down. She’s quiet, but I see the sulk in her eyes. Maybe it’s the lost ice cream.
She takes a few steps ahead of me and then stops. Waits. Turns around. Holds out her hand.
I don’t fight it anymore.
Let them see. Let them gossip in their parlors. Let them bring their enforcers, their orange-blooded hunters to track me down. If she can’t even walk these last few minutes without my hand in hers, then they’ll have to pry her from my corpse.