“Your phylactery?”
“You remembered the word this time. Good job.” He lifted his glass to her. “She can be taught.”
“Har, har.” She took a drink from her glass and shifted to sit sideways. “Ally was right. You are a jerk.”
Clutching his heart in fake pain, he stood to make himself a second glass. It seemed he was intent on having more than one drink. She would stick with the solo, however. She was a lightweight and already exhausted.
Although now she was deeply curious what Gideon was like when he was drunk. And what she might be able to get out of him if he was.
Evil plans for another day.
“And yes,” he answered her question while he made himself another whiskey on the rocks, “if my phylactery is destroyed, I die. My soul goes to the void with it.”
“Oh. And it’s damaged. And you need me to piece together that weird amulet I carved into my table to fix it.”
“Precisely.” He sat back down, just as heavily as the first. He looked so weary. She wanted to reach out and run her hand through his stark white hair and smooth it away from those impossible silver eyes of his.
The mental image of climbing into his lap followed shortly after. She shook it away and shoved it back into the corner it crawled out from. God help her, she really was attracted to him. She knew she was, but he was also the world’s most powerful necromancer, a lich, and a man who said by all rights she should hate him down to the marrow of his very being.
And she was drawn to him despite all of that.
“Gideon?”
“Yes, princess?”
“I’d like to get to know you.”
That stunned him to silence for a long moment. “Pardon?”
“I mean—I don’t know you. You just sat there and listened to me ramble about how I was a nutjob while you were pretending to be my therapist.” She glared at him.
“I—well, yes, but—”
She kept going, cutting off his stammering apology. “And since then, you’ve just been staring at me with sad puppy dog eyes and flinching like you’re terrified of me. And”—she changed the subject as she realized something—“you didn’t answer me why you’re afraid of me.”
He went rigid for a moment, and then his shoulders sank. “Because…” He growled and rubbed his hand over his face. “Damn it all, Marguerite. Damn it all to the pits of Hell. I’m trying so very hard to protect you.”
“I appreciate that, for what it’s worth. But I don’t want to be protected. I want to know what’s going on.”
He downed the rest of his drink in one go and set the empty glass on the coffee table with a clink. She would have laughed if it weren’t clear that he was both abjectly miserable and extremely nervous at the same time.
“Gideon.” She reached out and put her hand atop his where it rested on his knee. He stared down at her touch as if she were an alien. Not unwelcome, but utterly foreign. “Please.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed thickly. “You have one more death until your mind is rent to pieces and your psyche dissolves. I fear you’d be nothing more than a breathing husk. I wouldn’t let you stay that way. I’d destroy you out of mercy. And as you’re the only one who can mend my phylactery and keep this from happening again in the future, I…my life is in your hands, princess. Radu poses me no threat, but you do.”
He turned his palm over to take her hand in his. His jaw twitched as he paused to think over his next words. “Every time I have told you the truth of your condition, the whole of your story, you have fled from me in terror. You have broken down and begged for the sweet release of death, or madness claimed you and you took your own life in any fashion available. I will not—I cannot—take that risk again.”
“Because you’ll die.” She yanked her hand from his. “At least you’re honest about how selfish you’re being.” She got up to leave the room.
“No. Please, listen to me.” He hung his head and didn’t move to stop her.
She hesitated.
“I love you, Marguerite.” The words were said almost in a whisper. “I would lay down my life to spare yours. If I could break what binds us to save you, I would have done it already it. But I cannot. We’re in this together, one way or another. We shall either survive, or we shall die, tangled up as we are.”
Silver eyes finally turned up to meet her gaze. There was no doubt in her mind that he was telling her the truth. There was no one in the world who was that good of a liar. No one could fake an expression like that—like grief was burned into his soul. Like he was at the bottom of a fathomless pit, and she was his only hope of rescue.
Damn it.