The bed had felt impossibly soft under me, a cocoon I hadn’t realized I’d needed. Kael had left me after our short conversation, so I could rest some more, his golden eyes still burning in my mind, telling me to sleep for an entire week if that was what I wanted to do. And for a while, I had allowed myself to drift — to let the exhaustion finally swallow me. Now, waking, I felt a hollow emptiness in my stomach that made my knees weak.
Hunger.
My first real hunger I had felt in weeks.
I swung my legs off the bed and stood, wincing as my muscles ached from the tension and tears of the last twenty-four hours. The room was still bathed in faint starlight, pulsing gently through the silver-carved windows. Outside, the forests stretched endlessly, quiet and alive. The sky was impossibly bla
