I nodded, ignoring the dark emotions his words brought up. He wasn’t allowed to die. “And if something happens to me, will you—”
“I’ll make certain Quynh is taken care of. And your adelphia.”
Not able to help myself, I put my hand in his. I needed to touch him. He knew me so well. “I’m not sure Troas would be happy about me being their queen. They might have some negative things to say about it.”
“I will kill anyone who speaks against you,” he promised.
“Then you would have a very full schedule of shedding blood.”
We both smiled and fell into a comfortable silence.
“Eat,” he reminded me. “You need to keep your strength up.”
With my free hand I broke a piece of pasteli in half. I offered one to him. Something flashed in his eyes and then he took it. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I picked up my half and began to eat. It didn’t affect me the way it normally did. It was still good, but the way that he was speaking, as if we were approaching the end ... it made the pasteli not nearly as delicious.
Perhaps this was the time to get some answers.
“If I ask you something,” I said as my pulse raced, “will you be completely honest with me?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
“That is, if you can be honest without a truth serum,” I teased, trying to lighten the current mood.
It didn’t work. “I wasn’t compelled when I had the truth serum. I didn’t tell you anything I didn’t want you to know.”
My stomach was in free fall, my heart beating erratically. “That night you told me about your parents, what happened to your mother. Why would you share such personal stories about yourself with me?”
“I know how important it is to you to understand things. To know what drives people.” He finished off the rest of his pasteli. “What is it that you want to ask me?”
“Why did you take Quynh? Why did you let me suffer and grieve for her and not tell me?” My voice broke at the end of my question.
“I didn’t tell you that I had her because it would have revealed who I really was and I needed that to stay secret. If I’d told you I had her, you would have known I wasn’t a sailor. It wouldn’t have taken you long to figure out who I was. I had to adopt the Jason identity so that I could move freely without question while investigating my stepmother. I couldn’t risk anyone finding out that Jason and Prince Alexandros were the same person.”
But that connection had been made public when he’d come to the temple to retrieve me. He had revealed himself to the entire city. Hecould no longer go out as Jason once he showed himself in front of everyone with his scar.
“And I am truly sorry for the pain you felt,” he said, sounding remorseful. “I suppose I didn’t worry too much about your grief because I knew she was alive. It eased my guilty conscience. That, and I intended to reunite you with her.”
“What?” That was the first time he’d ever said that.
“I asked you several times if you wanted to return to Locris. If you had ever said yes, I would have put you and Quynh on a ship together and sent you both home.”
It was true—every time I had seen him in person before I knew he was the prince, he had asked if I wanted to go back to Locris. I believed that he would have let me go.
Which meant he hadn’t taken my sister to blackmail me into marrying him as I’d always thought. My adrenaline spiked and I let out a deep, shuddering breath. “But why did you take her?”
He hung his head. “I did that for you. I knew it would destroy you if something happened to her. I took her to keep her safe. As I said, I intended to reunite you when you were ready to go back. But you insisted on staying.”
There was a flash of white, and for a moment I couldn’t see or hear. This was what Quynh and Thrax had guessed—that Xander hadn’t taken her out of malice or to use her against me, but because of how he felt about me. He hadn’t wanted my heart to be broken.
I had been such a fool. I shouldn’t have kept things from him. I should have trusted him from the beginning. I’d been so caught up in my own feelings and problems and had let us go through anger and fighting and mistrust because I couldn’t see what had been right in front of me the whole time.
We could have avoided all that pain and misery.
There was so much I had to tell him. I didn’t know where to start. There was one thing I had to show him, in case he didn’t already know.
“Stay here. I’ll be right back,” I said. I stood and darted out of the tent, going over to the fire. I picked up a medium-size branch and brought it back into the tent.
