She couldn’t keep pretending, though. She just … couldn’t.
“I’m going to the ball, with you or without you,” she said. Even she could hear the defeated note in her words. “I will not embarrass you; I will not do anything to tarnish your reputation.”
She laced her fingers together in front of her, squeezing tightly. It was something to hold herself together.
“You’ll get what you want from your arrangement,” she said. “You will have the wife. You will have the heir whenever you decide the time is right. You will leave and abandon the home you fought for whenever you decide to do so. I understand that this is what will happen. I understand that I cannot do anything to change this.”
Hector seemed caught between concern and anger. Clio felt something else chip off inside her. She couldn’t even please him by giving him what he wanted, then?
“Is this about you thinking that I don’t want you?” he asked, his eyes narrowing. “We settled that, as I should not need to remind you.”
Clio shook her head. She longed for the days when their arguments would have them lunging into a kiss, though perhaps that unsteady foundation was always destined to lead here.
“It’s not that,” she said simply.
He raked a frustrated hand through his hair, sending the long black locks into disarray.
“Then I don’t see what the problem is, Clio,” he seethed. “You don’t understand how fortunate you are—how privileged you are.”
This, at least, shocked a little bit of emotion back into her. She hiccuped a laugh that, if not full of humor, at least it wasn’t a sob.
“Fortunate to be married to you?” she asked bitterly.
His expression darkened, and she could see, in that moment, why people called him a monster. She still wasn’t afraid, not when she knew what lived beneath, but still. She could see it.
“Watch yourself, Clio,” he said. “I am not sensitive to barbs like yours. I couldn’t be, not if I intended to survive a life of being unwanted. Abandoned. Lame. Broken.”
Each word left him with a crack, and Clio staggered beneath the blows of each of those words, words she’d known must have been levied a thousand times against a child who never deserved them.
“But youpush me,” he went on, “not because of anything I’ve done, but because you have never once in your life been brave enough to say what you actually want. So.” His gaze pinned her, like a butterfly to a card. “What do you want, Clio?”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. What words could she offer, after all, to describe a feeling that even she didn’t understand?
His mouth twisted bitterly. “As I thought. I was the one thrown away; you are the one who is truly lost.”
The words struck true enough that they made her anger rise again.
“If you are so wise, then,” she countered, “what is it thatyouwant?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I don’t want my brother to take what is mine. I don’t want to be in bloody London. And I don’t want to be surrounded by arrogance.”
He looked smug.
Clio let out another jolt of laughter. It likely was a sob, now, but she ignored it.
“Those are things that youdon’twant,” she said. “That is not the same as saying what you desire.”
He looked briefly stunned by this point. Clio didn’t feel a sense of victory, though. She just felt … hopeless.
“We should never have done this,” she said. “We should never have married. It’s broken. It’s all just …”
She shook her head, taking in his beautiful face, twisted with irritation, at this building that could have become a home if only they’d known how to ask for it. How to want it.
“It’s ruined,” she said. “It’s done.”
And then, before she could say anything else that she didn't mean—or worse, something that shedid, she left him behind, tears stinging her eyes for all the things she would never have.
CHAPTER 28
