VIKTOR
For a long, suspended moment, he just stared.
His eyes, those damnably expressive eyes I'd seen clouded with fear, bright with defiance, and dulled with grief, were now wide with a shock so pure it stripped him bare.
The practiced mask of the cold, untouchable prince was gone, shattered by the two feet of space and seven words between us.
I believe you have something of mine.
I saw the entire, frantic journey in his gaze, the initial, stubborn disbelief that I was a mirage, the frantic re-calculation of reality, a flicker of something fragile and vulnerable that might have been hope, and finally, a dawning, terrifying recognition that threatened to undo him completely.
It was all there, hanging in the charged air between us. The ten weeks of silence. The specter of my near-death. The ghost of Aisha. It was a shared, painful history written in the slight part of his lips, the barely perceptible tremor in his hands.
