“We’ll stop here for today,” he said with a smile so earned she almost cried.
“No,” she protested. “We have to do it. It’s expected—”
“Expected by who, exactly?” he asked. “Do you think they're going to check?” His voice carried that maddening, dry amusement she hadn’t yet decided if she loathed or envied. “We’ll leave a few clues—left jewelry, a wrinkled sheet. The court mob needs something to gossip about.”
“You don’t understand,” she insisted. “This doesn’t work that way. I don’t get to say no to duty.”
“I respected your boundaries earlier,” he explained. “Now I need you to respect mine.”
That made her pause.
“It shouldn’t look like it,” he added, quieter now. “Not when you feel like you’re walking into battle.”
“Battle?” Evelyne barked, stepping back, her hands slicing through the air. “You think this is a battle? Gods, Alaric, it's the whole bloody war.”
Her hands were trembling now. She didn’t bother to hide them.
“You should stay in your box,” she choked. “You’re supposed to be the charming ally. The inconvenient husband. Not a… not a constant.”
That made him blink.
“It’s easier,” she stammered. “Everything is easier when it’s sorted. Controlled.”
But it was already unraveling. The thorns beneath the silk. Her heart was racing toward something it didn’t know how to name.
“I let myself… once,” she said. “I let myself soften toward someone. I thought—” Her voice wavered. “And then he died.”
She looked at him, really looked.
“You don’t want this, Alaric. Not really. You deserve someone without rust in her chest. Someone who doesn’t flinch when you raise your voice, or freeze when you get too close. Someone who doesn’t mistake kindness for danger.”
He took a single step forward. “Evie—”
That’s enough.
She paced, words spilling from her lips faster than she could catch them. “Every day, every breath. Every choice weighed against expectations I didn’t set, promises I didn’t make, debts I inherited without asking. I don’t get victories. I get survival. I getmoments where I’m tolerated if I perform just well enough not to offend anyone's delicate sense of tradition. I get—”
She stopped abruptly, the words choking her now, her hands trembling as she ran them through her hair. “And now—” she gasped, pacing again, “you stand there offering me kindness like it's something I’m supposed to know how to take without ruining it.”
Her voice cracked, but she didn’t care. She was too far past caring.
“I don’t know how to—how to accept something that isn't laced with expectation. I don't know how to be—” Her throat closed up, the words clawing at her, raw and ragged. “I don't know how to be wanted without owing something back.”
She pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes, dragging in a shuddering breath, but it did nothing to steady her.
“I wasn’t even living anymore,” she admitted, her voice barely more than a rasp. “I was moving through the motions. Smiling when needed, speaking when expected. Like someone half-alive, playing at duty because it was all I had left. Existing with that…curse.”
She drew a shaky breath.
“I turned it all off,” she forced out. “I had to. There wasn’t enough room to survive and feel. Not both. Not if I wanted to stay standing.”
She paused, shaking her head.
“And then you came,” she croaked, looking at him now, raw and accusing and helpless all at once. “You with your stupid smile and your ridiculous questions, terrible jokes and your way of looking at me like I was more than just a crown balanced on a too thin neck. And I started tofeel.”
Her chest tightened, breath shuddering as she forced the words out. She couldn’t dare to look at him.
“So now everything is happening. Everything old and rotten and terrifying is crawling back to the surface. The ghosts I buried. The fears I learned not to name. They’re here. The danger, the betrayals, the gods-forsaken weight of it—and now I feel all of it. At once.”
