“There is talk,” Cassius whispered to me as I sat down in the chair next to his throne. “That Athan has agreed to let Dregon claim you for securing all the new human recruits.”
“But you would never allow that,” I gasped. “Would you?”
“No, of course not.” The way Cassius answered made it sound like I should have already known he wouldn’t have given me up, and despite still being trapped here, I was feeling less and less like merely his prisoner. “But, if the rumors that my servants have heard are true, then Athan may be effective at eliminating my ability to stand in the way of the arrangement he has made with Dregon.”
“What arrangement?”
“Athan has granted Dregon his request, in exchange for an assassination attempt on my life.” Cassius's voice sounded cool and void of trepidation.
I, on the other hand, felt as though anxiety had just swallowed me whole. “Athan wants to kill you?” I asked, realizing that I should have kept my voice down.
“Of course he does,” Cassius chuckled, but I failed to see how this was amusing. “He wants to silence the threat against him and gain unfettered rule over all the supernatural beings on Mystreuce. As long as I remain alive, Athan’s rule will never truly be unchallenged.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to watch you dance,” Cassius smiled as he waved his hand toward a rather attractive fae who immediately brought him a large glass of blood-red wine.
“You can’t be serious,” I said. “You’ve just found out there’s a plot to assassinate you, and the very man who is preparing to do it is here in your hall, and you’re simply going to sit here on this highly visible throne to drink wine while you watch me dance?” Even he couldn’t be that foolish to risk his own life.
“Oh, I’m very serious,” he grinned. “I’ve been waiting all day to see you dance in those new shoes.”
“But—”
“Mara,” Cassius said as he lifted my hand from the arm of the chair and coaxed me to my feet in front of him. “The snakes have to writhe out of the grass before they strike. I am watching, and I am waiting, but in the meantime, I would like you to dance for me.”
It wasn’t as if I could refuse him anyway, regardless of how strange my relationship with Cassius was becoming, he was still capable of forcing my hand, and I really didn’t want to give him any reason to let Dregon at me. So I stepped onto the floor in my beautiful new ballet shoes and started to move. The music was lyrical and enchanting, and although I was nervous about being near Dregon, I knew that Cassius was watching my every step and his . I didn’t close my eyes this time. I watched the crowd around me and tried to stay as far away from Dregon as physically possible. I occasionally glanced around to see if I could spot Quinn, who hadn’t returned yet as far as I could tell. Mostly, my eyes were locked with Cassius’s fixed gaze as I danced until the music stopped and my feet were too tired to do more. When I took a break to have some water, I sat at the edge of the floor and sipped from a silver cup that felt cold enough to be made of ice. Cassius walked over and stood next to me.
“I’m just getting some water,” I said. “Then I’ll dance more.”
“I think we’ll leave now instead.”
“But the party isn’t nearly even halfway through. Won’t your guests be upset if you leave your own party?” I asked.
“One of the great joys of being the host is that I can do whatever I please,” he said.
The other dancers stared at us as I got up to leave with Cassius. Surely, there were rumors about how much time he spent with me and not with any of the other humans. He grabbed a bottle of wine off one of the tables as we passed by it and shoved it into the crook of his arm. Then he picked up two silver goblets and let them dangle between his fingers as we left the main hall.
We walked along the corridors, and I happened to notice when I looked down that he was barefoot. It made me giggle to think that he was so powerful and esteemed in this world, and yet couldn’t care less about the formalities of it all. I wondered if he did it more for a show of defiance, or if he truly just couldn’t be bothered with shoes. Cassius veered off into a tunnel that seemed narrower and darker than the others. It also seemed to be winding upward as if it were trying to surface from beneath the ground.
“Where is Quinn?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I was just wondering. I hadn’t seen him since the party when Dregon pulled me to dance with him.”
I noticed Cassius make a small grunt, and when I looked over, I could see his jaw muscles tightly clenched. I wasn’t sure if it was my asking about Quinn that had upset him or the thought of Dregon forcing me to dance with him. Cassius must have an extremely high level of restraint to be endowed with so much more power than the others and not be tempted to fly off the handle and use it against them.
For some reason, though, he doesn’t seem to have that amount of restraint with me , I thought to myself as I remembered his hand going through the wall of his bedroom.
Although maybe his restraint with me was even more remarkable, and that could have been something other than the wall that he took his frustration out on.
The tunnel finally became too narrow for us both to fit through, so we had to walk single-file the rest of the way. Cassius motioned for me to walk in front of him, and as the climb became steeper, I felt his hand on the back of my waist to steady me. Finally, we reached the end of the tunnel and emerged outside . I couldn’t believe it; I was outside of the caverns and standing on the surface of Mystreuce. It looked exactly like the game I had played. It was nighttime, so the light was dusky and dim, but I could still make out the faint green of the rolling hills that spread out before us. And off in the distance, towering over the lower hills as if it were standing in a regal pose, was the glimmering, golden castle that I had become lost in exploring while inside what I had thought was virtual reality.
“Oh my God, it’s real,” I said in a hushed tone.
Cassius stepped up behind me and watched my expression as I looked around in awe.
“Thank you,” I said as I turned to look at him. “Thank you for bringing me up here and showing me this.”
The look on his face was one of pleased satisfaction.
“Whose castle is that?” I asked.
“Mine.”
“What? Then why does everyone live down in the tunnels below the surface?”
“They’re vampires,” Cassius laughed. “Remember? They can’t be in the daylight. That entire castle is lined with floor-to-ceiling glass windows. There’s no way they would be able to move around during the day there.”
“But you can,” I remembered. “You don’t share that weakness against the light, do you?”
“Correct.”
“Is there even a sun here in Mystreuce?” I looked up and saw what appeared to be several moons in the star-filled sky. It definitely didn’t look the same as my world.
“Yes, equivalently, at least,” he answered.
“So why don’t you just go live in your castle by yourself? Take your human slaves with you, and your fae servants; why would you want to stay down there in the tunnels and be in constant argument with Athan, when you could just as easily leave them all behind?”
Cassius sighed heavily and looked forlornly out across the landscape. “It’s not always a matter of what I want .”
The circles under his eyes seemed darker now beneath the moonlight, and the weariness in his shoulders was more pronounced. There was a look of yearning in his eyes, one that comes from having an unfulfilled dream that lingers just out of your reach. Cassius did want to live in his castle, above the ground, and on the beautiful land of his world, but despite the show he put on, he was too conflicted about his duty to his people to leave them all behind under Athan’s rule—even if he didn’t wear the official title of ruler .
I wasn’t sure what came over me, but I threaded my fingers into his. It surprised him, too. At first, his hand jerked back as if a bug were crawling on him. But as soon as he realized what I was doing, he inhaled deeply and closed his fingers around mine.
“How long can we stay out here?” I asked, not really wanting to put a time limit on this fleeting tease of freedom.
“For the night,” Cassius answered. “Come,” he said as he softly pulled me alongside him. We walked up the hillside in front of us until we reached the flat, grassy top and sat down. Cassius lay down with his back against the ground and looked up at the moons. He clasped his hands over his chest and closed his eyes to breathe in the fresh scent of the night air.
It must have been difficult for him to be surface the ground with the others, knowing that he didn’t have to, but also realizing that he did. I sat and stared at him for a few minutes as he lay there with his eyes closed, just breathing. His black silk shirt dipped into a deep V-shape on his chest, and the lines of his torso surfaced from beneath the thin fabric. I let my eyes run down his body and felt embarrassed when they seemed to stall at the top of his jeans. Cassius was always wearing black, which, along with his black hair and black eyes, made his pale skin look almost luminescent under the stars. I lay down beside him, close enough that I could feel his skin slightly pressed against mine, but not too close.
“Tell me about your home,” Cassius asked.
“My home?” I asked.
“Yes, your world. Tell me about it. I’ve never been there. Only Athan has ventured outside this world.”
“Why haven’t you ever left Mystreuce?”
“For fear of what would happen in my absence,” he answered solemnly.
I tried to think of some of my favorite things about living on Earth. I told him about the pulse of living in the city, the way the seasons change, and the seventeen different flavors of lattes that I had tried in my life, living in Boston. My ramblings were scattered and of varying significance, because it was difficult to boil down all the aspects of living on Earth in just a few sentences.
“Tell me about your dreams,” Cassius said.
My dreams? Lately, my dreams have been infiltrated by him, not really something I wanted to share.
“Yes, the things that you dreamed of doing in your life there. The things that you aspired to do and be in your world.”
That was an even more difficult question for me to answer. I had wanted to graduate, to join a professional dance company, to dance on the stage of the Boston Opera House, but now I was trapped here, possibly forever. I had worked so hard to reach my goals, and I had almost made it—almost. I hated Cassius for keeping me prisoner here and keeping my dreams out of reach…at least I wanted to hate him.
He opened his eyes and leaned over onto his elbow to look at me as he asked the question again. “Please,” he said.
I’d never heard him say please to anyone, especially not a slave.
“Tell me what you always dreamed of doing.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I answered dismissively. “None of it matters anymore.”
“That’s not true,” Cassius said as I looked in his fathomless eyes and watched as his brow furrowed. “It matters to me.”
I laughed, and it sounded just as harsh and pointed as I meant it to. “It only matters to you that I dress up in the pretty clothes you give me each day, and dance at your parties, and don’t try to run away.” I was being truthful and also a bit intentionally hurtful.
It wasn’t right that I was taken from everything I had worked so hard for. And it wasn’t right that I was here in a place that could easily relieve me of my life at any moment. But then again, when I lay on this hill and looked up at the beautiful sky and into Cassius’s stunning eyes, it was hard to say that none of this was worth it. There was at least a small part of me that found this world compelling enough that I had started to lose track of some of the pieces I’d left behind. Still, I didn’t want to give up on all my dreams, not just yet.
“I wanted to dance on the stage of the Boston Opera House. I’m sure that dancing on some stupid stage seems like no big deal, but it was something that was important to me. Ever since I was a little girl, I have dreamed of dancing on that stage. And as fancy as your main hall is, as beautiful as this world is, it’s still not the thing I’ve had in my heart to do since I was like seven years old.”
I shifted my gaze from his and allowed myself to wallow in self-pity for a solitary moment. I wasn’t the kind of girl to get knocked down and feel bad for myself, but I figured I deserved at least a minute, sixty seconds, to mourn what I had lost.
Cassius was quiet for a long while before he spoke again. “I will take you,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “Take me where?”
“To dance on the stage of the opera house in your world.”