Page 141 of Mate of a Monster

Not winter-cold or even corpse-cold.

Empty.

Whatever made Creed Creed is gone, and all that’s left for my hands to find is the shape of him.

I can’t breathe.

The cavern bends around me, the flowers blurring, and my chest locks tight around the sound clawing up my throat.

I did not know this could hurt. I didn’t know there was something worse than watching Legend kneel to that bitch because he cannot stop himself. Something worse than Thyrix’s soul stone burning into my blood.

But this is so much fucking worse.

My thumb drags over the edge of his cheekbone. “You idiot,” I whisper, and tears spill before I can stop them, hot and humiliating as they streak down my face. “You absolute fucking idiot. You were supposed to live long enough for me to forgive you, or not forgive you, or punch you in the mouth.”

I was supposed to get to call him a stupid royal dickhead and watch him do that tired little huff-laugh he does when he knows I’m right. He was not supposed to be lying here under a bed of death-flowers like some noble fucking offering.

“What the hell is wrong with you, you foolish royal?” A sob breaks free. Drop after drop, my tears land on his face. The moment they hit his skin, the Isles Kiss shivers beneath him and the black thorns tighten across his torso.

My arms stretch out on their own, palms trembling as they press to his cold flesh.

There is no warning or gentle slide. One second, I’m crying over his body and the next my mind is ripped open from the inside, flooded with Creed so fast and hard I double over. Everything he was comes pouring through me in brutal, blinding flashes.

It opens up with Legend dragging me through the royal gateway after Rathe U, after I was attacked, my body limp in his arms, his own expression a mask of fury. Creed watched him then, seeing the panic his brother tried to hide beneath rage and the desperate way he held me like he thought I’d disappear.

The scene tears away and another takes its place.

Creed in his rooms, sleepless and pacing, trying to read me and failing, failing, failing while I laughed and sharpened knives and learned Rathe like I’d always belonged there. I can feel his frustration, but there is something else under it now in hindsight. Curiosity. Wariness. The first little crack in what he believed about me.

Another.

Legend after sending me back to Exile.

Gods.

I feel that one like a knife.

Creed, he didn’t sleep. He stands on a balcony holding a magical mirror showcasing—me. Me, alone on the island after I thought Legend chose Arabella. Creed watches me, one palm pressed to his chest, the other tracing the shape of me in the mirror.

Another memory comes so fast it nearly snaps my head back.

Me returning to Rathe.

The pride that hits Creed when he sees what I have become is sharp, quiet, and unwilling—but it’s there. He watches me move through the palace with black fire under my skin and dragons at my back, a hidden smile curling his lips. But pride is replaced by gut-wrenching guilt so deep, my own stomach coils in on itself, pain wracking my body.

Another.

The books. The codex. The old scripts. Creed hunched over them while the palace slept, reading until his eyes burned. Searching until he found the first hints of what I was and what the Drakaryth meant. Answer about the dragons, soul stones, and the first flame, and every answer dragging him further from the lie he helped build.

Then Cosima.

Her voice low and maddeningly calm.

The blood of one.

My own runs cold at the memory.

At the time, the words only lodged in him like splinters. Now, I feel the moment they became a knife. I feel him understand, really understand, what the island took when Legend carried me off its cliffs the first time.