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He’d always despised these long wretched things. Between the white ribbons, red delilahs, and the same unimaginative phrases, thevotaiceremony would surely drone on for eternity. He stretched his neck and willed this to end, but his heart rose in his throat as he spotted her.
Her silver hair tumbled down her back in waves, and her green dress—
Fate’s take him. That was a unique brand of torture. Her honeyed gaze crashed into his, not with recognition, since they hadn’t been introduced, but with an unspoken challenge. Gaze narrowed, she stared him down. He cocked a brow back at her.
She placed her hands in another man's, yet her eyes remained locked with his. His heart wrenched toward her and, like a brick struck him square in the chest, breathing became an impossible feat.
Surely this was punishment for overstepping and playing god by taking his own fate in his hands. It had to be. Gods were cruel, he’d learned as much from his mum and brother’s untimely, sadistic deaths.
A notion needled his brain, a truth he couldn’t be more sure of, and it fit the thinly-veiled carnage of his life: he’d lost this woman before he even had a chance to know her name.
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For weeks, he’d avoided her with intense precision, because it was all he could manage. Besides, he was promised to another, and they would befamily.
The mere thought twisted his insides into knots. Even so, he plodded on, walked aimlessly through the days, dragged his feet through the nights, and existence blended into a festering mess of disappointment. Yet his ridiculous weak heart beat on, and his chest uselessly filled with air. It was just empty.
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Perseverance had always been overrated. Because he couldn’t watch her dance, touch, and kiss Merikh. No logical sense explained why he’d practically run from the ballroom. It was all some ludicrous misfiring of his brain. Maybe he truly was descending into madness.
Because they were nothing to each other, absolutelynothing, and he had no right to feel this way. They hadn’t even exchanged a polite greeting the day of her and Vesper’s engagement. And that was months ago.
To get away from it all—the ball, the expectations, how he didn’t fit, and his fragile future—he wandered into the hedgemaze. He refused to hope for anything. It had never gotten him anywhere before.
The maze seemed to close in on him, and he walked under the blanket of night, no stars to guide him, and his breath lingered out of reach. It was like those carriages. Those chambers. The closed in walls, the darkness, the slow devouring of space until his chest convulsed. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to rein himself in, to grasp his floundering control, and—
A prickle on the back of his neck stalled his panic. He frowned, then spun.
His heart sank as he took in her forest-green dress, flawlessly moulded to her body. Though she had no vestige, she glowed as brightly as a star. Like the stories his mum had told him of the fallen angels.
She viewed him inquisitively, cocking her head to the side in a way that was both adorable and held such authority he nearly stepped back.
“Are you lost, angel?” he asked, his voice steady though his insides quaked like a bumbling fool.
“I could ask you the same thing. You’re the one out here alone,” she said. She pursed her lips and looked him over, as if seeing him for the first time, though that wasn’t true. Because somehow their eyes always seemed to find each other in any room. She continued, “Are you alright? You sort of ran from the ballroom and you seem … distraught.”
“Never better.” He cleared his throat and shook everything he wouldn’t allow himself to feel loose. He knew he should dismiss himself and return to the party. Play nice with Izora. Put on the performance his father expected from him.
But he didn’t.
Her brows pinched. “We haven’t been properly introduced.” She extended her hand to him, a slight tremble in her fingers he didn’t miss. “I’m Emmery.”
She gave him a shy smile, and the moonlight became her backdrop, an ethereal grace that made his breath catch. In that moment, he was truly convinced she had to be an angel. And she’d offered her name in three perfect syllables, like a piece of herself she wanted him to hold.
He took her hand, and his kneesweakened. “Dez,” he offered back.
Rather than subject themselves to the party, they fell into easy conversation. She spoke of her mortal mother and sister, this strange new world, and she made jokes, she challenged him. At the night’s end, his cheeks ached from smiling.
He’d never met someone so pure and untainted by the world. In his mind, he made a vow that he would do anything to protect her. Even if she wasn’t his.
And he felt, deep down in his gut, that they would tumble into one another, time and time again. Because he didn’t fall for her. There was no slow descent.
It was a reckless, absurd, and unavoidableplummet.
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