Chapter 6 Reincarnated?
Caelan’s POV
She did not drown gracefully. I had half expected her to though. The Nymeria I remembered had done everything with a certain elegance even the terrible things. Especially the terrible things.
She had been the kind of woman who understood that how you moved through a room was its own language and she had spoken it fluently from birth. A princess down to the base of her spine.
This one hit the water like she was personally offended by it. The cursing started before she surfaced. I could hear it even underwater, a muffled stream of language that sharpened the moment her head broke the surface.
She came up gasping and swearing in the same breath, dark hair plastered across her face and both arms churning the water with the energy of someone whose fear had just turned into fury.
I stood at the edge and watched with my arms crossed.
“You absolute—” she spat water— “bloodsucking, cold eyed, teleporting, pond-owning—” another mouthful expelled—“I cannot believe you just — who does that —-”
She was not drowning. She was swimming badly and hating every second of it but she was not drowning.
The Nymeria from my past would have screamed. One clean highly pitched sound designed to make people move toward her. She would have known exactly how to deploy her own distress as a weapon.
She would not have wasted a single breath on profanity because she had considered profanity beneath her station. She had considered a great many things beneath her station.
I remembered the exact words. Three hundred and twelve years and they had not blurred even slightly.
The way she had looked at me when I told her what she was to me, what I was to her, the mate bond that had taken me completely apart and remade me around itself.
She had looked at me with those cool fae eyes and let the silence sit there long enough to hurt before she spoke.
“Your eyes are the color of something very dirty.” she had said haughtily, almost amused, the way she said everything that was meant to wound. “And your fangs are too long. Did you truly think I would bind myself to something like you?”
Something like you.
I had been a prince of eighteen years then. But I was powerful and feared across every kingdom in the Lore and she had looked at me like I was mud on the hem of her dress.
“ —you are absolutely unhinged, this is unhinged behavior, normal people do not shove—”
I blinked at Nyx because she had found the edge of the pool and was hauling herself out with her arms, graceless and still talking. She got one knee up onto the stone and then the other and then she was out, dripping on the dark floor shoving the wet hair off her face with both hands.
She looked up at me and I noticed the freckles. It was all across her nose and the tops of her cheeks. It's the exact same pattern I had memorized in the other lifetime. I had not noticed in the library.
I was not ready now either but there they were. This reincarnation was created specifically to inconvenience me. But I still needed my revenge.
She was staring at me with water dripping off her chin and her chest heaving and her expression doing something that was trying very hard not to become crying and very nearly succeeding.
“Why. Are. You. Like. This???”
“Like what.”
“Heartless.” Her voice cracked slightly on the word and she visibly hated herself for it.
She was genuinely brave in the unpolished way of someone who had never been able to afford the alternative. Definitely the kind you develop when the slums teach you that hesitation costs things you cannot get back.
I had not expected that either.
I looked at her properly. The way she stood despite being soaked through and terrified and running on nothing. The way she talked wirh rounded vowels and dropped syllables of the lower quarters of the fae. Nothing like the sculpted diction of the fae court.
She wore it without apology which meant she had stopped being ashamed of it long ago or had never been ashamed of it to begin with.
“Were you born in the lower quarters?” I asked.
“That is what you ask me right now and I won’t answer.” She blinked.
“Answer the question.”
“I don’t take orders from you.”
“You are in my kingdom.”
“Under protest. Loudly. Under very loud protest.”She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Are you a princess?” I asked again.
She stared at me. Then she laughed more disbelief than humor.
“Am I a—” She gestured at herself. At the worn dress now soaked through, thin fabric and patches at the hem I had not noticed before. “Do I look like a princess to you?”
“Answer the question.”
“It’s none of your business. Are you done? Is this the part where you drag me somewhere else and throw me into something again?”
I did not answer but my eyes moved down. I was not entirely certain when I decided to do that. The wet dress had become a different garment entirely. It was clinging to the lines of her body. Her perky breasts and hard nipples, the curve of her waist down to her hips.
She had a remarkable body. I was calculating against my better judgment how her skin would feel beneath that clothes. She would be cold right now. Will I heat her up?
“Excuse me!”
Slowly I looked up. She was staring at me with an a hard glare. Her arms crossed which was doing nothing to help the situation of how much I love the sight of her breasts.
“Are you done eye fucking me?” she asked.
I held her gaze. “No.”
Her mouth dropped open slightly.
“You are standing in my castle,” i stood there with nonchalance, “Dripping on my floor. I will look where I like.”
“You are unbelievable. You shove me into a pool, you keep me prisoner, you say I have some ancient debt and then you—” she gestured at me with one hand, showing the situation— “stare at me like I’m something at a market?”
“You should not flatter yourself into thinking I am the villain here.”
“You threw me in a pool!”
“You are the villain.” I said it unhurriedly. “You simply do not remember it yet. I am merely responding to established history.”
She stared at me for a long moment. Water dripped from her hair onto the stone floor between us.
“I am the villain. I, Nyx Ashborn, who scrubs pots for a living and came here to save my dying sister, is the villain?” She tilted her head. “And you, who kidnapped me and imprisoned me and threw me into dark water knowing I was afraid of it, are what exactly? The hero?”
When I didn’t answer, she huffed at me.
“Right. Good talk.“
