Flynn removes his touch before standing and taking a seat next to me on the couch.
“Then, I volunteered to go to the Mortal Kingdom to search for that magical pulse. To see if it was something we needed to prepare for.”
“Your parents didn’t object to you going?” I ask, knowing how it feels to watch someone I love leave. I wonder if leaving me would be as easy for him to do. If perhaps that is something he is planning.
“Oh, they did,” he answers, a small amount of amusement in his voice. “But they didn’t have a choice. I was going to go whether they liked it or not. My kingdom was the most important thing to me at the time.”
“Was? What is the most important thing to you now?”
“You are, Sunshine. Only you. I would—” He pauses, swallowing as he turns to face me fully. “I would doanythingfor you.”
I close my eyes, forcing warm tears to escape from their corners. “Except tell me the whole truth.” When my eyes open again, they meet his, and it’s like two shooting stars colliding in the night sky—the explosion is both brilliant and devastating. “Why didn’t you tell meeverything?”
“I wanted to wait to tell you until we arrived here. I was hoping that if you saw what I was protecting—where I had come from— you would understand my need to hold on to more secrets.” The words come out rushed, a sharp inhale following them.
Swallowing is difficult as my gaze searches his, looking for the lies between his words—for a false truth. But all that is there is that unrelenting devotion.
“I didn’t tell you I was the crown prince or that I was pretending to be mortal because I didn’t want to scare you. I hated the idea that you would think that all this is, allweare, is a mission. That you are somethingto be captured or taken back to a different prison. I swear to you, Rhea, the moment I realized you were the magic we felt, my plans changed. I was going to leave you alone and come back home.”
Gods, I do believe him. My foolish shattered heart beats harshly to each word he says like he’s the lifeline to my soul.
“So you knew the whole time that I had magic?” I ask.
He nods slowly, his shoulders rounding as the tension in the room thickens. I think about how, when I used my magic for the first time, he hadn’t looked surprised or shocked. How he had coaxed me to call it back in with language that—looking back now—clearly spoke to his familiarity with how magic is wielded. He never got angry with me for hiding it from him because he knew it was there all along.And because he was hiding secrets of his own.
Like arrows firing off in my mind, each thought stabs into me with ferocity. I’m so shocked and angry by what he hid from me, but I’m also deeply and overwhelmingly in love with him. How is it possible to be entirely encompassed by that love and still hurt like I do? How can I look at Flynn and know that he’s lied about so much and still feel like there is no one else that my heart is ever supposed to belong to?
Flynn shifts on the couch, closer than before but still not touching me. Just like how he used to visit me in the beginning, always so conscious of my wariness around touch. “You have every right to be angry with me,” he says softly, halting my scattered thoughts. “I will spend every godsdamn second on my knees for you, begging for your forgiveness, if that’s what it takes.”
For some inexplicable reason, my heart beats faster at the imagined scenario. As if sensing it, Flynn’s pupils widen, heat and desire fusing within them as we look at each other.Focus, Rhea.
“What is your real name?” I ask with a breathy whisper, trying to calm the baffling flutters in my chest. “I don’t know what to call you.” The cold reality of that truth douses the flames that had begun to spark. The past months I’ve gotten to knowFlynn. There is no other name that I could possibly think of to call him by.
“The only thing I want you to call me isyours, Sunshine,” he says, his voice low. That tension between us begins to shift, but doubt still lingers like a chill in the air. “But my full name is Nox Flynn Daxel.”
So Flynn is his middle name, then. I do find relief in that revelation. Maybe we could try to start over. We could try to rebuild our foundation from a place of total honesty instead of a mashup of broken truths. Perhaps here in a new kingdom, where freedom is something we both now have, we can truly discover what it is to be with each other. In all aspects.
“I do have something else I need to tell you.” The heat previously in his eyes dwindles until it’s replaced with an emotion I never thought I would see from him. One that makes the apprehension building a ravine between us wider.
Fear.
Chapter Seven: Rhea
“What is it?” Iask quietly, afraid to move. Flynn has never looked at me like this before, like I might actually break from what he’s going to say. “Flynn, what is it?”
He swallows, slowly running a hand through his hair as he says, “When I came to the Mortal Kingdom, I could feel that the magic was coming from somewhere in the castle. It’s how I knew to enlist in the King’s Guard—so that I could have more access to search.” His fingers tap his knee in a staccato pattern as he takes a deep breath before continuing. “Moving up through the rankswas an incredibly slow process. King Dolian was paranoid about who he allowed to be in the guard for the castle, even more so when it came to which ones would get near you. After nearly four years, I had narrowed down that the magic was coming from the tower specifically, but I couldn’t get anywhere near it without raising suspicions. I needed a way in.”
Dread begins to prickle over my skin as my magic coils tightly within me, poising to strike, but the only threat is what Flynn will say next.
“You have to understand. I wasdesperate.Four years of pretending to be someone I wasn’t had slowly chipped away at me. I wanted to keep my people safe, and in order to do that, I needed to get into the tower and figure out what the king had that was emitting so much magic. I needed answers so that I couldfinally leave.”
“What did you do?” I ask, but it’s not really a question so much as an accusation. And Flynn doesn’t miss the connotation in my words.
“I began to spy on the guards for your tower. To see if there was a weakness I could exploit to get inside,” he says, the cadence of his voice laced with regret.
A fear I had never even thought to consider begins to take root within me. The words are said a bit harsher when I again ask, “What did youdo?”
“I noticed that Alexi would often leave his post in the middle of the night. He’d go into the tower for about an hour and then come back out. A few times a week he would do this, but you already know that.”
