“It is, though.” I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to hold the dizziness at bay. “I wanted to see if there was anything beautiful here. And then I saw all the pigment in the rocks and got inspired. Can we just...start this whole discussion over? I feel like you’ve been having a one-sided conversation all night and convinced yourself of something that just isn’t true.”
“A convenient story. I suspect parts of it are true. But now I understand better your camaraderie with Lyro. You both twist the truth to your ends. You miscalculated in this case. You have not achieved your ends. No treaties have been signed. Your friend is not safe yet.”
“I’m not lying to you.” I feel my hands start to shake. I squeeze them into fists. Somehow, I’m losing him and Lena both, and I don’t know how to stop it. “I know you wouldn’t use her as a pawn like that.”
“Wouldn’t I?” he asks cruelly. He leans close to me, close enough to kiss. It’s a mockery of Lesson One, because there’s obviously no trust between us. “That’s your mistake. Because as ruthless as you feel about getting her back? That’s how ruthless I feel about making you stay. I will do whatever it takes. Use any advantage I have.”
“I told you, I’m staying,” I start to say, but then I immediately second-guess it. Ididwant to stay. I was going to make the best of it, figure out things to love about Usuri. But that was before he started acting like a huge asshole.
“Of course you are.” His tone is mocking, not at all the way he’s spoken to me before. “You’ll stay until your friend is safe. But then what is holding you here?”
You. That’s what my first instinct is to say. Except now he’s not holding me, he’s pushing me away. And I don’t understandwhy.Everything was sogood.
“Our...connection,” I stutter out. He barks a laugh, one with no humor at all. No tenderness, no romance. Nohim. “What happened while I was unconscious, Nik? Something happened. Because I just woke up and it’s like opposite day.”
He glares at me for a long minute. “When I saw the stones you’d collected, I blamed myself for not being what you needed. I thought, maybe if I prove to her that I’ve learned everything she taught me, if I show her how our trust and mutual generosity and connection would make staying here worth it, she won’t go. I couldn’t leave your side until you woke up, so I told my apprentices what to do. Order you clothing that fits. Cook you food without kuresh in it. Find youyellow flowers.”
He spits it like an accusation, but I can’t make sense of why. “Like the ones at my grandma’s house? That’s really sweet of you to remember.”
“Yes, ourconnection,” he says acidly. “I told Aqen to have some yellow flowers shipped in on the next transport for you, only to hear him reply, ‘like her dandy-flowers?’ And then I realized what wesharedwas nothing special. You shared it with him. Did you have his cock in your mouth when you told him the story, too?”
I feel sick. Not just my head, my whole body. My heart. “I shared it with Aqen as a friend. Friends also have connections, Nik.”
His gaze is flat and cold, and I realize hedoesn’thave them with friends. He barely has them with his brothers, and most oftheir connections are rooted in shared trauma. No wonder he doesn’t want to acknowledge it.
The stories he told me were secrets he’d never told anyone, and he was guarding mine with the same level of vigilance. I can understand why it ripped his heart out to learn that I’d shared the same thing with someone else. Why jealousy is eating at him.
“We have something special. Something that goes beyond one secret,” I say, sadness seeping into my bones because I know he doesn’t believe me. “Our relationship is going to be layered and tangled and keep growing over time. It is a friendship, which is a special connection—”
He cuts me off with a growl and I roll my eyes at him. “And it’s also more than that,” I add pointedly. “It’s also being partners. Lovers. Speaking and listening to each other’s souls. Forming a family, even without children. It’s all these different kinds of connection. We might have some of them with other people”—he growls again—“but not all of them.”
“I only want them withyou.”
“I can’t be everything to you, Nik. It’s too much to carry.” Damn, I feel the weight of it. He held onto all his painful past, all his private yearnings, all his secrets, until he found his fated mate.Me.And now he just wants to hand them over in one big batch.
The thing is, he’ll take gladly mine. He’s strong enough to carry it all, and that’s probably part of why he’s so confused and hurt that I’ve made connections with other people along the way. He doesn’t understand that even though wecouldcarry it all for each other, we’ll actually do a better job if we have support. We might break if we don’t.
But he looks like he’s breaking already, pacing the tiny room, two steps one way and two steps back, over and over.
“This is my fault,” he finally says. “I told myself I was being merciful by not claiming you as my queen. The truth is, I wastoo cowardly to ask for what I wanted. To afraid you wouldn’t be able to give it to me. But I should have trusted you with the question. Even if your answer was the same, that you couldn’t bear it, it would have been better to find out then than now.”
I know I shouldn’t take it personally. I should stay in my neutral listening space. But goddamn, it hurts my feelings that he regrets getting to know me.
Stay open. Stay present.
“Why do you think that?”
He leans against the door, tipping his head back with a groan. “Because you’ve shown me what it’s like to be loved, but now you say you can’t love me.”
“Come here. Please?” I beg, making space on the bed. He flings himself on it in dramatic alien king fashion, burying his face in the furs. I bet his skin is killing him right now, but I don’t want to turn this into another episode ofDelphie Fixes Nik While She Feels Like Shit, so I limit myself to two fingers, rubbing small circles on the back of his neck.
“First off, I didn’t say that. I want to love you. I want to be your friend and your partner and your queen and everything I can be. But I can’t also be your therapist—your mind-healer,” I correct, remembering the Irran terminology. “Look at what happened today. I had a small accident, and it made you fear losing me. That fear spiraled into this huge mess of jealousy and anger, accusations of lying, regrets about us getting close. I can’t absorb all that without being hurt. That’s what I can’t carry. Like if you’re putting it on me when you feel jealous or anxious, that’s not fair to me. It’s too much.”
“Frix,” he mutters. I continue my two-finger massage, working my way down one side of his neck to his shoulder. He pulls in a deep breath and lets it out with a shudder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I want to accept his apology, weak as it is. My stupid bruised heart is leaning toward him, wanting to comfort him instead of receiving the comfort it deserves. But that doesn’t help either one of us figure our shit out.
“Be honest with yourself, Nik. You meant to. You were trying to hurt me because you were hurting.” I slide my hand down his arm and pull his hand up to press against the center of my chest. “I know this is how it’s been for you, that connections hurt. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be, and you have to figure that stuff out without destroying what we have. What wecouldhave,” I correct, because whatever tenuous foundation we constructed has crumbled.
