She drew back, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, her chest rising and falling in uneven breaths. Confusion flickered across her features and something else.
Dread.
His own breath rattled through his chest, each inhale a knife twisting deeper. “Sera,” he managed, his voice raw, “I have to tell you something.”
Her hands slipped from his collar. She straightened slowly, retreating from that intoxicating nearness until she sat rigidly upright in her chair. “Why do I get the feeling,” she whispered, “that it is something I do not want to know?”
He nearly barked out a laugh—bitter, cracked, wild. He swallowed it down.
“Because you don’t,” he hoarsely confirmed. “Because you’ll hate me once I say it. But I have to tell you anyway.”
The truth was like broken glass in his mouth. Each shard sliced deeper as he forced himself to continue. “That night in yourbedchamber with the assassin…” His voice failed. He swallowed hard. “…He wasn’t the one carrying the witchblade. The assassin wasn’t from Arath at all, Sera. He was from Edmund.”
Her face went still. Perfectly, horrifyingly still.
There it was. The look he knew too well. The look every woman eventually gave him.
Horror.
Nausea ripped through him. But he couldn’t stop. Not now.
“It was me,” he bit out, forcing each word from his mouth. “Iwas carrying the witchblade that night. And I had every intention of using it on you before the other assassin arrived.”
Chapter forty-three
Seraphina
Those words hung in the air between them like a noxious smog seeking to smother her, to choke the very air from her lungs.
It was me. I was carrying the witchblade. And I had every intention of using it on you.
Her pulse stuttered. Her vision darkened at the edges. It had been him. It had been Aldric. Not the assassin.Aldric.Her husband. The man she had just kissed. The man that, for all of a moment, she had almost thought she—
Seraphina pushed herself away from her desk so abruptly that she nearly sent her chair clattering to the floor. Heatrushed up her throat, mingling with a cold, hollow ache that sought to rip her chest in two.
How could she have been so foolish?
How could she have been so easily taken in by his strength? His fierce protectiveness?
A bitter laugh bubbled in her throat. He had even warned her that night, had he not? When she had…swoonedinto his arms and thanked him for rescuing her?
“Never thank me for this,”he had whispered against her ear.“Never, do you hear me? Never.”
A tremor rippled through her fingers. She curled them tightly into her skirts, trying to hide it, trying to hold herself together while the world shifted beneath her feet.
At long last, she had the final piece of the puzzle. The single sliver of truth that had eluded her for so long. And now that the whole picture had snapped into place with brutal, sickening clarity, she wished she could unsee it.
“Sera…” the Crow dared to whisper.
She recoiled as if he had struck her.
“You may not call me that name,” she snapped, ice cracking through each syllable. Authority. Fury. Hurt. “That familiarity is a privilege, Your Majesty. And you have forfeited your privileges.”
Aldric’s throat bobbed, but he said nothing.
In his silence, she drifted further away, placing her desk between them. She forced herself to meet his gaze—forced herself to look into the eye of the man who had just unraveled her world. Theman who now had the audacity to gaze at her as ifhewere the one who had just had his heart gouged from his chest.
The man whose kiss still burned her lips.
