Renit's silver eyes flutter open, blinking once, twice. A deep groan rumbles in his throat and he sits up in bed, moving on shaken arms. All but a second later, he realizes there's a titanium band on one wrist and he's chained to the bed with the other. He yanks on the chain but the bedpost doesn't give way—neither does the titanium band.

Each movement is weak from the sedative Hallie provided hours ago.

I hate to see him this way, a threat to my safety and to anyone else who might come into his chambers. We don't know if his power is taken care of; as soon as we remove the band from his arm, it could swallow us all. This Grounding is worth nothing if that happens.

"Roux!" He shouts, oblivious to me sitting on his windowsill and watching as a doe and her fawn nibble through a small meadow hiding within the trees behind the castle. "Roux, get in here!" He yanks on the chain again and the wood groans. If he wanted to, he has the strength to take down the entire bed and carry it with him out the door.

I clear my throat and he jumps, eyes flying over to where the sound came from. With the lazy wave I give him, a simple twist of my wrist with the key, he growls underneath his breath.

"Good morning," I jest.

"Unlock the shackle and the titanium band. You have no right," he barks.

I want to milk this for just a few moments. I want him to feel what it's like to be me, to walk around this castle without a hint of one's power. With no band around my wrist, the presence of rock and stone pushes in on me and the entirety of my power wants to take down the tower and the entire castle with it. My power wants to work.

"Let me know why you snapped." I walk over to the side of his bed, barely out of reach, and cross my arms over my chest. The key dangles from my fingertips and Renit watches it warily. He's forming a plan in his head and trying to figure out what he can do to get that key without the arms to do so.

"I don't remember, the power had taken over by then." His arm reaches forward and I watch his fingers stretch only inches short of reaching my stomach and wrapping around my shirt. He grits his teeth with the strain.

"You must have a hint of what happened. The power doesn't push you out of the way entirely; you continue to see and hear what is happening—you just can't do anything," I retort.

His nostrils flare. I smile wickedly at the shackle wrapped around the post and how helpless he looks in this situation. Anyone walking into his chambers right now would think this setup was different.

When he notices what I'm smiling at, a muscle feathers in his jaw and he forces himself to look at the windows—at the armoire, anything but me. "Something you said must have triggered it. I don't know."

"Would you be able to recognize the words if I said them to you?" I ask, moving to sit on the foot of the bed. Now he's really out of luck, if he wanted to, he could have used his legs to grab me moments ago. His boots are only inches away from me. The look of disappointment on his face tells me he recognizes the missed opportunity.

He rolls his eyes. "I might," he growls through clenched teeth.

"You are demon to some. Angel to others. And you are my angel."

He blinks at me, at the words that left my lips. They hang in the air, cold icicles threatening to drop onto our heads and stab through our skulls. At first, he says nothing. His face switches blank, pale, then his throat bobs as he swallows. "My power recognized those words. They're from...a book somebody I knew used to read. They said those words to me too," he says quietly.

I sigh. It's time. He needs to tell me who is burdening his memories because whoever it is, they're in the way of this Grounding and who Renit is trying to become through his power's tendency to be a nuisance. They're eating away at his soul, slowly. It will leave him with nothing. "Who did you lose?"

He stares at me, silver eyes searching over my face and then to the bruises still feathering my neck. For the first time in my life, I've lost my ability to breathe twice in one day. Before today, it's never happened.

"You don't need to know that." He looks down at the hand with the titanium band pressed against his flesh.

"Is it that girl?"

His stare snaps back to me. "What girl?"

"When we first initiated the Grounding process, I saw a girl, a graveyard, and...my parents losing their heads. I felt your rage and despair. Did you lose a woman you love? Your wife, perhaps?"

There's such softness in his face that I think he might answer the question but it's replaced by the cold calculation I saw the first day we met. Hate, that's what he will always feel for me. If I keep prying further, that will never change. I don't want to wait for the spitfire comments, and the hateful, worthless crap he throws in my face.

"Get me some water," Renit says coldly. He jerks his chin towards the bathing room.

Typical. He won't answer the question and he never will, not until he's ready. On my deathbed, maybe, that's the best I can hope for at this point. I'll never truly know Renit Marron in all his glory when he keeps everything from me, including the events shaping his life and his personality.

I slide off the side of the bed and fill a glass of water sitting on the counter. When I bring the water back to him, now sitting on the edge of the bed, he takes it with his free hand and before I can move out of the way, his legs wrap around me and tug me against him. Shocked, I brace my hands against his chest as the insides of his knees press into my hips.

My cheeks immediately blush as his face is close enough to mine to share breath. The prince has seen me naked, he's explored my power, I've explored his and yet this—this is my undoing. A simple touch from a prince I've already felt—with no desire. Cold embraces are his thing.

Renit grabs my chin with his free hand. "Next time you think about handcuffing someone to a bedpost, at least have a backup plan when they capture you," he whispers. I stop struggling only for a second, a breather, as he leans in close to me.

I haven't wondered what it would be like to kiss the prince, we've been too busy hating each other for that to happen. Neither of us has considered it until now, as I do in fact wonder what that would be like and as his nose brushes against mine, my stomach leaps into my throat and something shifts in my back pocket.

The key jangles in his hand as he pulls away, smirking that he's won, and finally releases me out of the strange grip he put me in. I blink. My racing heart is what forces me to step back out of the reach. Too close. We came too close.

"Tell me," I manage to say. His scent lingers like a ghost. Heat from his legs still presses against my sides.

"I'm not telling you anything," Renit retorts. He unlocks the titanium band from his wrist then does the same with the shackle keeping him to the bedpost.

I groan. "Why not? Why don't you trust me to know what happened before I was here?"

Renit makes quick work of freeing himself and slides off the bed to stand in front of me. The closeness drives me another step back, but he doesn't notice as he attempts to stand without swaying. Hallie's sedative may have been too strong, but the dosage was supposed to keep him down—Silas's request. He hadn't desired to come back to Renit's chambers and find nothing left but crumbled stone and burning sheets.

"What you think happened became true long before you were born. And that is not your information to have—drop it." He shoves the titanium band and chains into my grip. Immediately, I drop the titanium band as it sucks my power away. Then he stops, turns back towards me, and clamps that band around my wrist before flashing me a toothy grin.

An empty reminder settles in my stomach as my power disappears. Every day, as I learn to grasp the ancient flow, it becomes harder to move without the tingling of what I've grown to know.

"We've all lost, Renit. You've lost your mother and—"

The prince holds up a callused palm to stop me. His shoulders tense but other than the slight motion of turning from relaxed to the tight nature of a soldier, he shows no flicker of recognition for the woman that birthed him. Neither prince has cared. "We don't speak of the past, deal? My mother and anyone else I may have lost will not influence what our magic shares unless you keep asking about it. Just...stop."

"So, to you, our past doesn't matter? The deaths we've had to endure."

"Finally, you're catching on." With a roll of his eyes, he claps both of my shoulders and saunters towards the bathing room. He needed a stronger sedative, I would have preferred that. He peeks his head back out the door. "You can leave now, we're done here."

I shift my jaw as he disappears again and let the chains clatter to the floorboards before I leave.

Death doesn't matter. Nor does it discriminate.