“Ididfind someone,” he growled, taking a deliberate step closer, crowding her.
“You—”
“I foundyouand I fell in love with you, and you have the fucking nerve to stand there and tell me what I feel for you isn’t real? After everything—” he shook his head, looking back at her with his heart in his eye and his hand at his chest. “You think what I feel, here,” he thumped his chest hard enough for her to wince. “You think it’s not real? That I don’treallyfucking love you?”
Terena shook her head, which was the exact wrong thing to do.
His face changed, a mask so dark, so filled with violence, it did not belong to him. Daris was a warrior, aye. Through and through. Yet whenever there was battle, whenever he’d had to fight, he’d never been this.
Terena’s temper flared to match his wrath.
How dare he?she thought as she stared him down. Did he not realize how difficult this was for her as well?
“I know you believe it, Daris,” she fumed, no longer willing to back up as he neared, his chest pressed against hers aggressively. “But it is only an enchantment. Magic. The Fates. Before you were even born, our bond was decided. You had no choice?—”
“I don’t need a fucking choice!”
His shout reverberated throughout her body, drawing a deep shudder as she willed her heart to stop responding to him. Her chest throbbed with the pain of not being with him, of saying these words to him, of denying the very thing that made her heart soar.
“I do!” Terena screamed back at him, her chest heaving against the pain, against the torment of saying things denyingtheir bond. She took a step back. Nearby, soldiers stopped to stare at them.
Daris stilled at her words, blinking his good eye as he stared at her for endless moments after her words stopped echoing between them.
The expression on his face was as if she’d plunged her hand into his chest and yanked out his still-beating heart. He looked at her as if she’d betrayed him; she feared that, aye, she might have.
Hardening herself against the expression that threatened to break her, she squared her shoulders and stepped back.
“Believe me,” she said, hoping to placate him. “I do not take pleasure in your pain. It is my pain, too. But I won’t—I can’t—believe it’s real unlesswemake the choice. Without the bond. Without the Fates pushing us toward each other.”
“Do you love me?”
Gods.Terena closed her eyes against the agony his words speared through her, cutting more cleanly than the sharpest of blades.
“Of course I love you, Daris,” Terena whispered, finally looking at him. “That’s my point.”
“Your point?”
“Aye,” she breathed, putting out her hand. When she realized she’d meant to touch him again, she pulled it back sharply, holding it to her chest as if burned. “I love you. I love you so much I ache when I’m not near you. I dream of you. I am formless without you. But is that me? Or is that the bond?”
“That islove!” Daris bellowed, his arms stretched out.
“It is the bond!”
“Why does it matter?” Daris’s question was so plaintive, tears sprang once more to her eyes and she ruthlessly blinked them back.
“I want the choice,” Terena begged. “I want to choose you. And I want you to choose me. I want to have found you because I—” Terena pounded her chest—“cannot live without you.”
“I truly do not understand,” Daris said with a frustrated swipe of his hand through his short hair. “I love you. I don’t care why. You are…everythingto me.”
“Daris—”
“You want me to defy the Fates? Is that it? You want me to spit in the faces of the gods and tell them I do not want this gift?—”
He stopped to scoff, and the way he swallowed, Terena was certain he was holding back tears of his own.
Daris straightened and looked down at her with defiance. “I will not. I will not be the one to tell the Fates I do not want this… this treasure they have seen fit to give me. I fucking love you. And you want me to tell the gods I do not want the bond they have given us, to love each other, to be everything to each other and for each other, because what, you didn’t get to choose? You are choosing right now!”
He shook his head at her, his face a mix of love and hate so powerful she gasped and stepped back.
