It’s now I see Ben’s face pale, his arms dropping to his sides. He would never forgive himself if anything happened to Blair and as much as we’ve becomesomethingthese past months, she has a part of him that no one else will ever touch.
“It’s more complicated than that.” My words draw her stare to me.
“Is it? Because you seem to have come off well in this.”
The coldness in her voice perishes me.
“It isn’t like that.”
“Really? Because you had me in your bed and Ben tucked away here. Best of both worlds, Isaac?”
I hear them break.
Hearts. Three of them.
As irreparable as the tarnished crowns that fall from our heads.
I was born the bastard son of the man who governed a country I loved. I was taught to become a politician, one who could charm and appease and mediate.
Manipulate.
But here I am raw and ungroomed. Here, with these two people that I love, I am the bones of me, without finesse or polish or any of the pretty words I know how to grace the ears of people who wield the power.
“Fuck you.” The syllables are slow off my tongue.
Ben turns to me, eyes cold. Blair doesn’t react.
“It would’ve been easier if I did use you. Then I could walk away. But don’t expect me to, either of you.”
Because I’m there now. Those fractured shards of my heart still pulse and as much as they hurt with every beat, I don’t want them to stop.
I don’t want this to stop.
The three of us.
If we can be repaired.
Nothing prepares you for the moment when your heart shatters.
Nothing prepared me for this. In this room, with a man who’s heart’s so guarded he doesn’t know what he can feel and a woman who feels she can never be loved just for herself.
Nothing can prepare us for what must come.
A coronation with a tarnished crown.
Worn by who?
Part One
January - two months before
“It is January and I am tired of being brave.”?Arzum Uzun
Chapter One
It’s morning, the first of a new year, but there’s no light. A grey sky shrouds grey mountains and a black loch, white virgin snow carpets the ground, but there’s no beauty in it.
The room I’m in is minimal. White walls, a marble fireplace with a clean grate and white sheets. The woman wrapped in them is pale, the golden hue that her skin had in summer has faded. Her blonde hair sprawls across the pillows and she’d buried herself into one, the one that I knew smelled of Ben.
