Quinn kissed me this morning, slept in my arms last night. She’d looked at me like I was her future.
This asshole clearly couldn’t read the room.
I leaned back in my chair, excited for her to look into his smug face and say, “N?—
“Yes,” Quinn whispered.
Edric rose, a victorious smile carving across his face. “Wonderful! I’ll announce it to the court this evening.”
Time cracked open.
The air was too thick. I tried not to pass out or punch a monarch.What was she thinking? Was this all part of some master plan she hadn’t filled me in on?
It couldn’t be real.
But the ring was.
Her answer was.
My fingers closed around the crystal goblet beside my plate, the delicate stem biting into my palm. I didn’t even realize I was gripping it that hard until?—
Crack.
The stem snapped. The goblet slipped from my hand and shattered against the stone floor along with my heart.
32
QUINN
The crystal splintered with a scream. My head snapped toward the sound. Mav stared as if I had driven a dagger into his chest and turned the hilt. Shock and ruin warred in his eyes. Disbelief begged for a kinder truth, as though he were waiting to wake from a nightmare. Mav’s grief and heartbreak flooded hot and merciless along the tether.
What have I done?
Did he…could he…?
Does Mav love me?
The thought knocked the remaining breath from my lungs. Had I laid waste to the possibility of real love with one uttered syllable? Panic stabbed through me. Guilt burned behind my eyes.
But how could I have believed it? How could Mav love me, a creature cursed and used, whose every bond had been a weapon in another man’s hands? Desire and tenderness were not the same as love. I had long since learned the peril of mistaking one for the other.
I had said yes to Edric because it was what I was taught to do—what every frightened instinct in me had learned to equate with survival. Better the devil I knew, better the chains I understood, than to hope for a freedom I could not trust to last.
Hope is a crueler prison than stone. I could not afford to be wrong about Mav. Not when the cost was a hundred years of sleep. The spell demanded love given freely and returned, a path that had never carved itself out in three centuries.
Edric offered a way out. He had explained that marrying would break both of our wretched curses. After learning his parents had cursed both of us, I no longer carried resentment toward him. I did not love Edric, but marrying him would give me a chance to live. A loveless marriage was survivable. I did not have the strength to survive another century imprisoned in sleep.
I had not said yes to Edric. Not truly.
I had said yes to release. To relief.
However, the look on Mav’s face communicated that he saw no difference.
Those fierce, hazel eyes searched mine, pleading for something I did not have the ability to offer. In an instant, they changed. Warmth drained. His jaw locked. A shield fell between us. He rose so abruptly that his chair clattered to the floor.
“Excuse me,” he choked out the words.
“Mav,” I breathed, standing.
