Chapter 3

They threw us into the border forest.

The rain was still falling. I couldn't tell rainwater from blood as it ran down my forehead and gummed my eyes shut. I blinked and found Lucian in my blurred vision, a few steps away.

He'd fallen in the mud like a discarded old coat. I knelt beside him, my knees sinking into the muck. I pressed my hand against the deepest wound on his chest, and blood welled up between my fingers, warm, with an iron tang, a heat unlike any blood I'd smelled in the castle. The blood there had always been cold.

"Lucian." I forced his name out of my throat, thin and hoarse. "Lucian, wake up. You can't die. What am I supposed to do if you die."

His eyelids twitched, then slowly opened. Those once deep red eyes had turned a dull brown now, from the sealing of his power. He looked at me a long time, as if making sure I was still alive.

"Nora."

"I'm here."

"You said separate, just now."

"I did."

"Take it back."

"Lucian—"

"I said take it back." His voice was soft but firm. "I won't separate from you. Power or no power, whatever happens later, I won't separate from you."

My tears fell on his face.

"But..."

He reached up, his blood-soaked fingers brushing my cheek.

He didn't know about the curse. He thought I was only afraid, only hurting for him. He didn't know there was a thing living inside me that could kill me at any moment, that separating was good for both of us, and that the only thing it would betray was the love between us.

After that, we moved into a garage in an old housing complex.

I forced him to hate me, forced him to leave. I smashed the crest he gave me, called him useless, drove him to the folding cot in the corner of the garage to sleep, and made him buy gifts he couldn't possibly afford.

But when the curse activated, my heart felt like a thousand fine needles, the pain rolling through me until I shook and broke into a cold sweat.

Go ahead and make yourself miserable, muttered the voice in my blood that wasn't mine. That was the curse's own will, the "warden" my ancestor left behind, a thing with no feelings that only enforced the contract.

Shut up, I said in my head. What I do is none of your business.

What you do decides whether the curse activates. Go soft once, and the blood sinks one degree deeper, until you die. You weigh it yourself.

I ignored it. I stood up, brushed the dust off my knees, and headed for the garage.

So now a man who had once been a noble lived in a twenty-square-meter garage. His "wardrobe" was an old bookshelf hung with three work jackets, all bought from the wholesale market, twenty dollars each. His "study" was a plastic stool by the folding cot, stacked with a few books he'd dug out of a secondhand stall.

His hands were covered in chilblains and calluses. There was a burn the length of my hand on his right arm, still weeping fluid.

He'd gone to clear out a sewer line that day, in a twenty-six-story building. He'd dropped into the pipe on a single rope. It was filthy and stinking down there, with corrosive gas. There was a time he wouldn't even drink from a glass someone else had touched, and now he spent whole days in a place like that.

It was all because of me.

The door rattled.

Lucian pushed it open and came in, reeking of the docks and coated in dust. A large patch of his coat was wet. His face was still beautiful, sharp and fine, jarringly handsome against the wreck of the place around him. He saw me sitting on the edge of the cot, stripped off his dirty shirt, pulled me into his arms, and said, "Hey. Were you waiting for me?"

I almost wanted to cry. How could I be this cruel, hurting the person who loved me most in the world, again and again.

"Where's the necklace?" I shoved his outstretched arm away, hard. "The one I asked for. Did you buy it?"

Lucian was quiet for two seconds, then took a small box out of the inner pocket of his coat. The box was old, its corners rubbed white, but he'd wrapped it carefully in several layers of tissue.

"I bought it," he said, handing me the box.

I opened it. Inside was a thin gold chain with a tiny flower pendant. The price was four thousand dollars.

I looked up at him. His face was a little wounded as he watched me, not understanding why I'd pushed him away, his hand trembling slightly. There was a fresh burn on his right arm, the wound spreading from his shoulder all the way to his chest, the skin shriveled, some of it still weeping.

"Where'd the money come from?" I asked.

He didn't answer.

I knew the answer. Someone on a forum had said the property managers hired a guy to clear a sewer line, and some kid better-looking than a prince got splashed head to toe with corrosive liquid. That was him.

The curse warmed faintly inside me. It knew what I wanted to say, and it was warning me.

“Aren’t you the one who can’t stand touching things other people have used?” My voice rose. “Won’t wear clothes someone else has worn, won’t touch jewelry someone else has touched. So why would you go buy secondhand junk, huh?”

“You look down on me too, don’t you. Drop the act. Don’t think buying me some cheap necklace is going to fix anything.” Even as I said it, the tears came anyway, traitors. I wanted so badly to ask him whether it hurt.

My eyes drifted down to those long hands of his, hands that had once touched nothing but wine glasses and parchment, now covered in calluses and chilblains.

"It's not secondhand," he said, voice low. "I bought it at the counter."

“The counter costs four thousand.” I threw the box on the cot, and the little flower bounced out and rolled twice across the sheet. “Where would you get four thousand? Did you go do something reckless again? You’re an ordinary person now. You won’t age and you won’t die, but you can still hurt, you can still be crippled. And if you end up crippled, who’s going to support me?”

"Does it hurt? Do you hurt?"

The curse suddenly burned, and the blood drained from my face.

Lucian looked up. "It's my fault. Blame me, all right, just don't cry."