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Wicked raked me over with a thoughtful look. “I can’t pretend to know if I would have made a better ruler, but I wouldn’t have done this.” He swept out a hand as if to encompass some fractured dream he’d been clinging to for three hundred years.
“Why don’t you look like the others?”
He shook his head, his gaze casting skyward. “They don’t look like that, either. Those are glamors they wear to interact with humans to convince them to kneel. They think it makes them seem more godlike. More omnipotent.”
I considered that, canting my head. “Well, it works.”
Wicked huffed out a derisive note. “Indeed.”
“I think I want to go to sleep now,” I said, my hands pressed to my stomach.
“You take the bed,” he said. “No chain, of course. Fuck, Rowan, I’m sorry. You have no idea how sorry.”
“Yeah, okay.” I stood to walk over to the bed and then stopped and turned back.
“Who lived in this castle?” I asked. “Why is it out here?”
“No one. I built it over the years, hoping one day people would fill its halls.” Wicked paused, his eyes drifting over the room as if creating the life he’d envisioned but had run out of paint. “But when it was done, and I was still alone, I realized it was too depressing to live in it all by myself, so I closed it off and moved into this room where I’ve stayed ever since.”
“You built the entire thing alone?”
He rolled his shoulders as though the memory was a painful one and met my gaze with one full of remorse and yearning. “I had nothing else to do, Rowan.”
I nodded, digging up the seeds of my empathy for what it must have been like to be so lonely for so long. Climbing into the bed, I slid under the covers and fell asleep to the howling of the wind.