“You know I care about you.” He shifts uncomfortably in his chair, his eyes like polished sapphires as they study me. “But who I am and who youbelieveme to be are not the same person, Daje. A part of me wishes they could be, that I could fit into the mold you so clearly want me to, but I can’t.”
“I just want you to be yourself,” he counters.
“Do you?” I volley back with soft accusation.
His jaw clenches as he glances away, staring at the wall. “When you were gone, I spent some time with Rhea. I found her to be somewhat of an anomaly at first. She was quiet yet vibrant, shy yet subconsciously commanded the attention of whoever was near her. She moved through this kingdom as if she wasn’t aware of the presence she held, and it reminded me of your brother.” His gaze shifts back to mine as he runs a hand over his head. “Nox has always been the most powerful among us, but his command is a quiet lethality that only just tempts you to pull it out of him. Yet when they were together? There was no clashing of verbal swords. I don’t doubt they argued, but they made being in love look soeasy.I couldn’t help but think thatnothingwith you has ever been that way.”
I can tell by the gentleness of his voice—the way it rasps and nearly cracks at the end—that he doesn’t mean it as an insult. Still, claws of irritation sink deeply into me. It shouldn’t hurt to realize that perhaps our friendship wasn’t as I made it out to be in my mind. At least not to him. Wasn’t that the crux of it? How many times would I find out that my selfish desires and the pursuit of them had blinded me so?
“And even with that realization, I still want what wecouldbe together. I still wantyou,” he continues.
A yawning pit opens within me. How easy it was to be steadfast in my decision to break his heart while I was in the Shifter Kingdom, and how naïve I am to think it would be anything other than awful. “Ican’t.”
His hands come to rest on the table, the shadows of the nearby flames dancing across his face as he lifts a brow. “I’ve never known you to back down from a challenge, and I don’t understand why you are doing so now.”
“Daje, listen to what you’re saying. I’m telling you I cannot be with you in the way you want, and you’re telling me toworkharderat trying to be? Who does that benefit? Who wins in that scenario?”
“We do!” he snaps, his fingers stretching out towards me. “What you feel for me, it can be enough—”
“I don’t want to just feelenough!” I shout, standing so abruptly my chair falls behind me. “I want to be consumed. I—” My chest heaves, the sound of my heart beating like an angry drum through my skull. “I want to feel like I’m so overcome with what it means tobein your presence that I can think of nothing else. I want to feel your absence like a stake to the chest!”
He shakes out his head, standing to lean over the table. “That’s not love, Bahira; that’sobsession.”
“Can’t they be the same?” I hate the way he looks at me, as if I’m nothing more than a child attempting to speak about something I have no knowledge on. Maybe I am. But what I experienced with Kai and my past with Daje clash together in my head and in my heart, clearly pointing out the differences between the two in a way that I can’t deny.
“No. Love is tender and soft. It’s caring for someone even when it’s hard.”
“Oh, please,” I snarl, narrowing my eyes. “That is whatyourlove looks like, not mine.”
“And how would you know what yours looks like?”
“Because I have felt it!” Like a death knell, the words ring out and hit their mark. The stunned quiet that follows grows taut between us, an arrow pulled on a string just waiting to be released. Except I am not sure who is holding the bow.
“Not with anyone here, which means—” His expression shifts as he looks at me.Fuck.I swallow any kind of retort down, pushing it into that deep chasm within me, but it’s too late. Whatever look is on my face makes Daje solemnly chuckle, his hand forming a fist and pounding into the table three times tothe cadence of his words. “Of-fucking-course. You’ve fallen in love.”
“I’m not in love,” I argue defensively, the retort weak even to my own ears.No, I can’t be in love.Hadn’t I just analyzed what love looks like moments ago in the council room? It was not love with Kai—itcan’tbe. Regret winds with my own indignation down my spine at how the conversation has so clearly gone in the wrong direction. “Daje, I’m sorry—”
“It’s fine, Bahira. Really,” he interrupts, dropping his gaze to the table. “Though it might not have always been done in the right way, all I’ve ever wanted is for you to see just how fucking perfect you areas is. If you’ve found someone who makes you feel that way…” His eyes lift up to meet mine while he stands. “Then what do I have to be upset about?”
Silence is all I can manage as I watch him leave. The room grows colder in his absence, his words leaving their mark on me as stark as the tattoos that are drawn on Kai’s skin. It isn’t just what Daje said but what I unconsciously confessed to us both. Infatuation with the shifter king is one thing, and even I, in all my stunted emotional availability, can recognize that I care for him beyond what I ever thought I would.But love? I can’t admit to that, because doing so means that I have sacrificed so much more than I ever intended to, and if that is true, how am I supposed to move forward?
“Are you alright, Bahi?” my father asks from his place across the table the next day, weariness evident in the lilt of his voice. I lift my eyes from where I’ve been staring at my plate of food, the steam once wafting from it now gone. The queen’s dining room seems bigger than it did before, full of empty seats at the table and shadows that linger menacingly in the corners.
“Yes.”
Reeling in the aftermath of my conversation with Daje, I had done the only thing that seemed logical and dived right back into my work. I didn’t want to remain in my room, not with the condemnation of his words still echoing within it. How the revelation of my own screamed with them. I checked in on Nox, who remains slumbering in an eerily still manner, Cass returning from the break my mother forced him to take as I was leaving. We all wore varying degrees of exhaustion on our faces, even if Cass tried to hide it beneath a terrible joke or two.
Then I made my way to the library, returning the journals I had taken with me to the Shifter Kingdom—much to Elisha’s relief—before asking her to point me to any text that might speak of two things: the creation of the Spell and the ancient mages who experimented with blood. While researching the Spell certainly wasn’t out of the ordinary, asking for information on the latter was. It had practically been a scary bedtime story, the tale of mages who mixed blood and magic with devastating results. But I imagined, like most stories, there was a bit of truth woven into the tales. Elisha had only stared at me, her eyes growing wide for a brief moment before she tucked a graying strand of hair back into the bun on the top of her head.
Leaning in close, she kept her voice low. “Those texts would likely be kept in the palace archives, Your Highness. You’ll need permission from a council member to enter there.”
My answering grimace made her chuckle, though she couldn’t know it was because asking the council to help withanythingright now seemed a perilous task. She at least guided me towards a section of text that she claimed spoke of life in the Mage Kingdom through the millennia.
“Perhaps there is something to go off of in one of these,” she said, gesturing with a wrinkled hand before returning back to her desk.
After spending some time perusing, I grabbed a few titles of interest, intent on reading the rest of the morning when my return to the palace was interrupted by a run-in with my father. It was easy to say yes when he asked me to join him for a meal. I had missed my family while I was gone and with the worry that had captured me on the journey back, the urge to spend time with them pressed on me.
“The council has once more asked for a debriefing from you,” my father says, his finger tapping on the table. “Have you decided what you are going to divulge?” I had given my father a small recap of the more important things that had happened during my time on the island. It felt nice, getting to talk with him about Kai in even the barest sense.
