“The Regent’s son.” Tristan’s voice was toneless, but I felt the dull force of his shock. “Did he relay my message?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said with a shaky laugh. “Though he intended to use it to his own advantage, not mine. And he enlisted my brother to help him.”

Leading him up the stairs to one of the windowless rooms where the dancers practiced, I explained Aiden and Catherine’s plan. My words were jumbled, and perhaps only half of what I said made any sense, but he did not interrupt. Tristan was tense beyond measure, but you’d never know it to look at him. His face was smooth with composure as he wandered the room, examining the sparse furnishings. It was not comfortable between us and our reunion was not going as I’d imagined, but to focus on such things now would be foolish. He was rattled, that was all. What I’d done must have come as quite a shock.

Retrieving some toweling from a shelf and soaking one of them with the water can in the corner that the girls drank from, I turned back to him. “Sit,” I said. “I’m taking those things off you, since you seem unlikely to remove them yourself.”

“I can’t…” he started to argue, but I interrupted him.

“Your father isn’t here. He can’t come anywhere near you now, and there isn’t anyone he could send capable of making you put them back on. I haven’t survived this long only to have you kill us both out of foolishness.”

His jaw tightened, and the reluctance I felt sparked anger in my heart. “Unless you have a very good and very logical reason why they should remain in place, you will sit down and allow me to remove those things.”

Tristan stared over my shoulder at the plain wall and its barre. “It’s unpleasant,” he finally said. “I don’t want you to see.”

“Not good enough,” I said, settling down on the floor and arraying my supplies around me. “Now sit down.”

“Fine.”

He eased out of his coat, and although I could feel the pain ricocheting through him, he did not flinch. Hiding his weakness from me. He sat down cross-legged, and rested his elbows on his knees. The motion pulled the cuffs of his black shirt back, revealing the steel manacles. Black fabric wrapped around his wrists and halfway up his forearm, but it was damp with blood, the smell of it thick in my nose. Gloves concealed his hands, and my pulse sped as I considered what might lay beneath.

“Lift your elbows,” I said, hoping my voice was steadier than I felt. Not that it mattered – he could feel my emotions as much as I felt his. It crossed my mind how foolish it was that we ever tried to hide them from each other.

Spreading a towel across both our knees to catch the mess, I carefully slid his sleeves up to his elbows, then started to work unfastening the knot holding the fabric in place. My fingers brushed the warm skin of the inside of his arm, and he made a soft noise. When I looked up, his eyes were closed. Clenching my teeth together, I started to unravel the fabric. Slowly, I told myself, because I didn’t want to hurt him. But in reality, I knew it was because I was afraid.

I was right to be.

The skin beneath grew icy the closer I got to the manacle, the pale luster of his skin turning the grey color of death, the veins beneath black as though they ran with ink, not blood. Sweat broke out on my forehead as I peeled away the sticky fabric to reveal the blackened wound beneath. The only thing I had ever seen like it was severe frostbite, and this was different and worse.

It took every ounce of control I had not to react, not to weep for the horror of what had been done to him, because I knew he would not appreciate it. Pain and shame built in the back of my head as I peeled off his glove, revealing a hand that was dark and immobile. Barely recognizable as the hand that had once made me burn with the slightest touch.

“It’s iron rot, if you were wondering.” His voice was tight.

I nodded, although he couldn’t see through his closed lids. Leaning forward, I examined the steel encasing his wrist. There was no lock on it – only a metal clip holding it shut. That bothered me more than it should, because it meant what had kept them on was fear of something worse.

Holding the manacle steady, I flipped the clasp, and without warning him, I pulled the metal spike out of his wrist. Tristan jerked back with a sharp hiss of pain, pulling his arm out of my grasp. His shoulders hunched around his wounded arm, muscles spasming as he struggled to keep from retching. Then his other arm was in my face, the motion so fast I barely saw it until it was over. “Do the other quickly, before I lose my nerve.”

I did what he asked, working swiftly. “Now,” I said, warning him this time.

He tensed, and the metal made a sucking noise as I pulled it free. “Bloody stones and sky,” he swore, then added on worse, bending at the waist so all I could see was the top of his head.

Anyone else, I would have held. Whispered soft reassurances. But some instinct told me that to do so would only make things worse. It hurt my heart that I could do nothing to ease his pain, but what stung more was that he didn’t want comfort from me. I clenched my teeth, waiting for him to master the pain without my help.

When he straightened, I silently set to cleaning one of the injuries, his hand as cold and rigid as ice as I wound a bandage around his wrist. Part of me had thought the wound would instantly start to improve once the iron was out, but it remained the same. What if that meant it wouldn’t get better? Should I offer to try to heal them?

“Are you going to be all right?”