They were alone.
She turned in her chair to face him as he stalked right toward her.
“Why would I marry you?” he demanded, like the thought had been grating on him. His eyes were wide and creased. He hadn’t slept at all, it looked like.
His voice was so full of rage, so full of irritation, that she didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t help feeling insulted.
Grim rolled his eyes impatiently. “Nightshades don’t marry. And you’re...you’re aWildling.” The way he said that word, spat out like an insult, didn’t make her feel any better.
He sighed, his fingers flexing, as if he knew he was failing at actually trying to get her to answer. “Look,” he said, flatly. “You’re obviously attractive.” She raised a brow at him. He gestured toward her in a harried movement. “That’s not what I mean. I just—I need to know. Why wouldImarry...you?”
She had never seen him so worked up. He looked almost crazed. “You...loved me,” she said finally.
He shook his head, as if that was completely out of the question. “Did you have something I needed? Did you find me injured? Did you...poison me?”
Her mouth parted in indignation.
But his eyes filled with hope. “That’s it, isn’t it? You...youpoisoned me.” Once the words sunk in, his expression clouded with rage.
“No. No, I—”
Her words were cut off when his shadows pinned her to the wall. Her breath was knocked out of her, but she couldn’t help but notice that her head didn’t hit the stone on impact. It was like his shadows cushioned her ever so slightly. Was it subconscious? Was there a part of him buried deep down that still remembered her?
Her hope died when she took in his expression—unmovable, fixed in its fury. He was just like Cronan when he had latched onto a thought in her mind, digging in, cutting deeper, fixated on getting an answer. “Then what was it? Did you threaten me?”
What? What could she possibly have held over him? He seemed to agree, because he moved onto his next theory.
“Did you use an elixir?” She glared at him, shaking her head.
“Then what was it?” he demanded.
“I didn’t doanything.”
His shadows suddenly released her, and she collapsed into a heap on the ground. He loomed over her, and she worried this whole thing was pointless. He would never trust her, never believe her.
“I just—I just need to understand,” he said, his tone still sharp, but like he was trying his best to sound gentle. Which resulted in not sounding gentle at all.
Isla remembered what it was like to have gaps in her mind. She knew it must have been driving him mad. She had felt similarly when he was the one telling her they had an entire love story between them.
One he had made her forget.
At least, she remembered slowly, over time. Grim never would. But if she had any hope of him falling in love with her again, he had to believe that he had once. And he had to learn more abouther.
“You—you know what it’s like to be trapped and alone,” she said, slowly, without moving from the ground.
“I know loneliness as much as you do,” she said. “My childhood was not so much an upbringing as it was a sharpening, of turning me into a weapon. I had spent my whole upbringing thinking I was powerless, weak. That I would disappoint my people.”
He nodded once, seeming to understand her. She knew he could understand, because it was so similar to his own story.
“I found a key out of my cage under my floorboards,” she said. “A stick imbued with your own portaling power that you had given to your general. My...my father.” She watched as his eyes darted back and forth as if scanning his memory, processing this information. “You...indirectly...gave me freedom. And that’s what led me to you.” She swallowed. “I told you already how we met.”
“When you stabbed me,” he said, flatly.
She rolled her eyes but pushed on. “After that, you were using me. In order to get somethingyouneeded.”
Grim huffed. “Finally, a part of this story that sounds believable.”
She glared at him. “But then...you changed your mind. You chose me, and...and I suppose we kept choosing each other. Every day. Through every obstacle. Neither of us had pure intentions. It didn’t happen smoothly, or on purpose. By the time we realized it...” She took a shaking breath. She didn’t know if she was saying too much too soon. She didn’t know if this was something he needed to uncover in pieces, the same way she had slowly regained her memories.
