“Our father is telling the truth,” Lorian confirms, dropping beside his brother. “And we even told our father to say nothing, but the old man refused. He said he’d told you it was a marriage of convenience.”
“He didn’t. Not in words I understood. He should have tried harder. I didn’t eat for days. I tried to escape. I was punished. I was depressed. I almost gave up on life.”
“But you didn’t,” Gai retorts. “And you’re better for it. All those punishments gave you a chance to work on yourself and purge your childhood trauma. I would say you’re stronger now than when you arrived here. And if you want to stay at the Obsidian Palace as my pet, you can. Or as a free woman, once your sentence is served.”
His words make my stomach cramp and I look at him in disbelief as he waits for my answer. He is the most contradictory man. “You just said you wanted me gone!”
“I don’t allow myself to grow attached to anyone,” Gai said flatly. “Attachments only complicate exits.”
“Father always saysthatwhen he doesn’t want someone to go,” Rafe says. “Don’t take it personally. As for our marriage. Zira agreed to marry us for her own business interests. Neither love nor sex had anything to do with it. However, publicly we did have to keep up a small amount of appearances, and I’m sorry for that.”
My mind starts turning. Even though, I hated that they married Zira of House Serath, her name was burned into my mind, and every time she was in the news, I listened intently. She is a very powerful woman.Someone I could never compete with. “But why would she do that? What could the Ascendant Alliance ever offer her?”
“Not us. You, Eve. One of the humans you saved at the Grand Championships was important to her,” Rafe says. “She wanted you to know that. Now, aboutourmarriage?—”
"Marry?" I can't breathe. “How can we marry? If I’m seen as truly sentient now, then don’t I have to go to the mining moon?”
“No,” Rafe says. “That sentence collapsed the moment the vote passed. Forced labor cannot follow reclassification.”
“Now you’ve been reassigned under custodial jurisdiction—court attached, not condemned. Monitored service, not a mining moon,” Lorian adds.
“And my monitored service is to marry you both?”
Lorian caresses my face. “Oh, my sweet clever heretic, yes.”
I can’t help myself, and I allow myself to lean my face into his large, strong hand and I close my eyes as tears begin to fall. “From the moment Lira mentioned that people said I could be your wife, if I hadn’t been human, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.”
Rafe puts his hand on my other cheek and wipes away my tears with his thumb.
I take a shaky breath.“And for a while we had the perfect relationship, the three of us, or at least I thought so, until…”. I can’t continue speaking as I break down sobbing.
“Oh, Eve, you have every right to hate us,” Lorian says. “But we are here begging for your forgiveness and asking you to come back to the Spire and be our wife.”
“I can’t believe this is happening. I feel like this is another trick by the Scorn’s Cage. Maybe I’m still in it, hallucinating.” I begin to get worked up, and I push their hands away, but instead of moving back, they each grab one of my hands. To ground me to the physical truth.
“Eve, this is real,” Rafe says. “We hurt you, and we are sorry. We wanted to marry you from the first time we met you.”
“But it took Rafe these years to change the laws,” Lorian says. “We can punish him together if you’d like?”
That makes me smile. “Youarereal,” I say, squeezing their hands. “In all my fantasies, you never fight like you do in real life.”
Rafe kisses me and then Lorian.
And I allow them.
“So you will marry us?” Lorian asks between kisses.
“Return to the Spire as our wife,” Rafe says.
“But my punishment, my sentence?—"
"Still stands," Rafe says, pulling back from kissing me again. "But you can serve it out as our wife—because marriage places you temporarily under our joint custodial authority, rather than the IGC’s.. You can work again, have your suite back, if you want, be a person again, even if you're not legally free yet.”
“How is that serving my sentence?” I ask, afraid there’s some terrible dark side. It sounds too good to be true. And one thing I have learned about this side of the galaxy is that there is always a darker side to everything.
Lorian takes both of my hands in his and looks at me sympathetically. “You can never return to Earth. You cannot speak your human language until your sentence is up, which if you accept this offer will be extended to ten years, and you cannot leave the Celestial Spire for the next ten years. Not even to go to Falcon Station. The hotel will be your prison.”
“Ten years?”
