That she didn’t want him to marry someone else.
Her midnight-blue eyes watered. She squeezed them shut, then looked away from him. “I’m leaving. I’m taking Ellena with me.”
“What?” Ozik barely processed the words.
“She isn’t safe. Not from your father, not from anyone. Veragi has told me to go. It’s time, Ozik.”
Ozik stiffened. “Stop. Tomorrow, I will become the most powerful witch in the city. The most powerful witch on the continent. The Ohros witches have said so.”
Julianna took back her hands, and the loss of her skin against his left him cold. “And with all of that power will come a host of enemies. People who will take her from us both in an attempt to harmyou. A wife who will carry an undying vengeance at you having a child with someone else. With someone like me.”
“I dare them to try,” Ozik snarled. “And I told you, it is not what it seems. I have no intention of marrying that woman.”
Julianna wiped a stray tear from her face. Steeled her expression in that unfathomable way of hers. The strongest woman he had ever known. “Ellena cannot be fodder in the cross fires of your future. Surely you know that.”
Ozik shook his head. Reaching out, he gripped the gate just so he would have something to hold on to. “You can’t go anywhere; I won’t allow it.”
Juliana tilted her head, dark magic swirling up her arms in menacing threads of black. “You have always been bold, Ozik, but never so painfully wrong.”
The pulses of her magic filled the space around them. Julianna didn’t take kindly to his commands, not in the early days of knowing her or any of the days that followed. Perhaps that was part of the allure—she was not like his mother, or Diana, or any other woman he had known.
“Go,” she demanded. “The sun is setting.”
“Jul—”
“I saidgo,” she snapped. Her magic flew from her in tendrils, a warning if Ozik had ever seen one. He had not known Julianna at her lowest, but if it was anything like the other Veragi witches he’d read about, he didn’t want to be near her if she lost control.
But he also didn’t want to send her back to their daughter like this.
Julianna turned and walked toward the house. Ozik touched the necklace in his pocket. She could see reason if he just showed her his version of the future. The things he knew that the Ohros witches did not. The truths that they could never see, because they lived inside Ozik.
“Marry me,” Ozik said.
Julianna stopped in her tracks, just in front of the house. She wrapped her handwoven shawl around her shoulders tighter, staring at him like she wasn’t sure she heard him correctly.
“Marry me,” Ozik said again. He couldn’t help himself. He walked through the gate and up the pathway to the house, giving her all the time she needed to back away.
But she didn’t.
Ozik swept a strand of hair away from Julianna’s eyes, savoring the feel of his fingertips against her skin. She had never let him back in again, not after she’d learned she was with child. Seven years pulsed between them, and he had longed for her in every single one.
Julianna pulled away. “Don’t. Don’t say things you do not mean.”
He caught her hand with his own, tugging her back to him. He used his free hand to pluck the necklace from his pocket and display it for her. “I mean it. I mean every word,” he assured her.
There was a hardness to Julianna after what he’d put her through. The way her life had been forced into a box of Ozik’s making. She could not find work. She could not marry someone else. All she had was what he had given her, and his gut twisted when he thought of the consequences she paid for both their actions. He wanted so desperately to soften her once more.
And at the sight of the necklace, soften she did. Tentatively, she reached, running her finger along the links.
Any trace of the dark Veragi magic on her fingers and wrists disappeared. She gasped, pulling her hand back. “Ozik, what is that?”
“It is part of my family’s anchor,” he told her. “It binds you to me, and through me, to Zetyr. My god will protect you. If you wear this, my father cannot harm you.”
Julianna’s breathing sped up. “Ozik—”
“I mean it,” he interrupted. “Don’t leave. I don’t think I will survive it. Take this, and then when I earn my father’s magic, marry me.”
She inspected the links of the necklace, the small black stone within it. The raw edges, the piece broken from a larger chunk. “When I touch it, I cannot feel my magic. It goes silent.”
