CHAPTER THREE — ONLY FOR YOU (2)

She set down her brush and turned to face me, and there was paint on her nose and fire in her eyes, and she looked at me the way no one had ever looked at me: like I was a question she was trying to solve instead of a king she was trying to impress.

"Everyone keeps saying I'm a phase," she said quietly. "That you'll get bored. That I'm just—new. A novelty. A girl who spilled wine."

"The world talks," I said. "The world has talked for nine hundred years. It has never once been right about me."

"It's not just the world," she said. "It's you. You don't—you never explain. You say you've been alive for nine hundred years like it's a parking ticket. You ask me what I am. You're afraid of me, Dorian. What does that mean?"

I crossed the room. I had meant to keep the distance. I lost the argument with myself before I reached her.

"There is a curse on my blood," I said, "older than this country. It is called the Unbound Fate. It means nothing will ever move me. Nothing will ever matter. For nine hundred and seventy-four years, it was true."

She was very still. "And then?"

"And then you spilled wine on me." I reached out, slowly, giving her every chance to stop me, and touched the paint on her nose with the pad of my thumb. My hand shook. The curse sang. "And the curse cracked. And I felt—everything. At once. For the first time in my life, I felt."

"Dorian—"

"I don't know what you are," I said. "But I know what you've done. You've made me want. And I have wanted nothing for so long that I forgot wanting was a thing that could happen to me."

Her eyes were wide, and wet, and I had made a woman cry before—I had made empires cry—but never like this, never with tenderness, never with my whole chest shaking.

"I don't break rules for the world," I said. "Only for you."

She kissed me.

It was not a small kiss. It was a kiss like a door finally opening, like the first breath after drowning, her hands in my collar and mine in her hair, and I felt the curse scream and shatter in ten directions at once, and I held her like she was the only solid thing in a universe of ice.

And then my phone rang.

I ignored it. It rang again. Again. Leon's ringtone—the emergency one, the one he'd programmed for exactly one reason, the reason I'd spent nine centuries preparing for and had somehow, in three days, almost forgotten.

"Boss," Leon's voice said, the moment I answered. "The Moone. She's moved."

I looked at Layla—at the girl who had just cracked my curse open like an egg, paint on her nose, mouth swollen, eyes full of questions I wasn't ready to answer.

"I have to go," I said.

"Dorian—"

"I'll come back," I said. "That's the first promise I've made in nine hundred years. Don't make me break it."

I left her standing in the light of her own painting, and I did not look back, because if I looked back I would stay, and if I stayed, the old families would find her in the wreckage of me.

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LAYLA

At 2:17 a.m., someone knocked on my door.

Not the landlord. Not Max. Not the ghost of my dignity.

A woman.

She was tall and silver-haired and dressed like money that had been alive for a very long time, and she smiled at me the way a glacier smiles at a ship.

"Miss Hayes," she said. "I'm Cressida Moone. I've been watching your work."

"My work," I repeated, from behind a door I was definitely not opening all the way.

"Mm. The mural. The paintings." Her smile deepened. "And the man who commissioned them."

"What do you want?"

"To offer you a job." She held out a card embossed with a crescent moon. "The Moone Collection would be honored to represent you. A museum, Miss Hayes. Galleries on three continents. Everything you've ever wanted for your art."

My hand reached for the card before my brain could stop it. "And what's the catch?"

"No catch. I'm simply generous with people who—" her eyes flicked over me, measuring, "—are about to be disappointed."

"Disappointed about what?"

"About him." She said it gently, the way you'd tell a child about a pet's death. "He can't love you, dear. There's a curse on his blood older than this country. The Unbound Fate. It means he is incapable of love—it's the entire point of the curse. The only thing he can love is what you are, not who."

"What I am?" My voice came out small.

"The vessel," she said softly. "The key. Every old family has hunted for the Spirit-Touched Mortal for a thousand years. The body that can crack a curse, open a door, wake a king." She smiled. "You're not his first love, darling. You're his first weakness."

She left the card on the doorstep. She also left a small canvas, wrapped in velvet, that I almost threw away and absolutely should have thrown away.

I opened it at 4 a.m., alone, with my diamond-coned cat watching from the bed.

It was an old painting. Ancient. A woman made of fire at the edge of morning, and a crowned figure kneeling before her with his hands out like he was drowning.

Like he was praying.

I stared at it until the sun came up, and I did not call him, and I did not tell him, and I told myself it was because I was tired.

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DORIAN

Across the city, in a tower that had never known warmth, I stopped mid-sentence.

A spike of fear hit me in the chest like a blade. Not mine. Hers.

I felt her—felt her—from across eight miles of Manhattan, the bond that should not exist, the thread that had no right to be there, flaring with terror and something worse: grief.

"Boss?" Leon's voice. "Boss, you just dropped your glass."

"The Moone," I said. "She went to see her."

"How do you—"

"Find out which house she belongs to," I said. "Every one of them. And prepare the tower."

Leon went very still. "How bad?"

I looked out at the city, at the tiny light of the borough where she slept, and I felt the curse—the one that had defined my entire existence—shatter and reform around a single point of fire.

"Mess with me, and you die," I said quietly. "Mess with her—"

I didn't finish. I didn't have to.

The city had been mine for nine hundred years. It was about to learn that everything I'd ever owned had been, from the moment she spilled that wine, collateral.

Cold to the world, gentle only for her.

They had no idea how cold I could be.

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