"I am going to let you live," I say, and each word is a deliberate choice. "Not that you deserve my mercy, and it’s not because I care about the political complications your death would create for me. I am letting you live because I want you to spend every remaining day of your miserable existence knowing that your daughter chose me over you. That she saw exactly what kind of monster you are, and she walked away. And if you ever—" I grab his hair and force his head up, making sure he is looking directly into my face. "—step out of line again, if you so much as breathe in her direction without her permission, I will end you. I will end everyone you have ever loved. I will burn your legacy to ash and salt the earth so nothing grows where your name once stood. Do we understand each other?"
He nods, tears streaming down his bloody face, and I release him with a sound of disgust.
Drake and Konstantin fall back as I straighten, their work done, and I turn to find the only person who matters in this entire godforsaken night.
Persia stands near the edge of the firelight, her arms wrapped around herself as tremors rack her slender frame. Smoke curls between us, painting her in shades of gray and amber, and when our eyes meet I see something in hers that makes my chest constrict with fear.
She’s put distance between us. Not only physically, but I can sense it in all the ways a person can retreat without moving a single step.
“You're bleeding.” Her voice is hollow, scraped raw by smoke and screaming when I walk toward her.
I look down at my shoulder, at the blood that has soaked through my shirt from the wound my father's bullet left behind. "It is nothing. Drake patched me up enough to get here. I will have Massimo's people look at it properly once we're home."
Home. The word hangs between us, and I watch her flinch away from it like it burns.
"Persia." I cross the remaining distance between us and reach for her, desperate to feel her solid and alive beneath my hands. "It is over. Magnus is dead. Your father will never touch you again. We can go home now. We can?—"
She takes a step back.
The movement is small, barely more than a shift of weight, but it stops me cold.
"I can't." The words crack in the middle, breaking apart like ice over deep water. "Rafael, I can't."
"What do you mean you cannot?" I reach for her again, and this time she catches my hand with both of hers. Her fingers are cold, trembling, and the blood from her wounded palm smears against my skin as she holds me at arm's length.
"Look at me." Her voice is stronger now, steadier, like she is drawing on reserves I did not know she possessed. "Look at what just happened. Men died tonight. My father is bleeding on the ground twenty feet away because you shot him. Magnus tried to force me into a blood contract, and you killed him, and the church is literally burning behind us. This is your world, Rafael. This is what it means to be yours."
"I will protect you." The words sound weak even to my own ears. "I will always protect you."
"That is the problem." A tear slips down her cheek, cutting a clean line through the soot and blood. "I do not want to need protection. I do not want to be the prize at the center of a war between men who see me as property to be won or lost. I spent my entire life being my father's pawn, and then Magnus's prize, and then yours. When does it end? When do I get to just be Persia?"
"You are not my pawn." I step closer, and this time she does not retreat, but I can feel the tension in her body like a wire about to snap. "You are my wife. My partner. My?—"
"Your heir-maker." The bitterness in her voice could strip paint from walls. "That is what you wanted from the beginning, isn't it? A womb to fill and a contract to fulfill and a solution to yourfather's ultimatum. You saved me from Magnus, but you did not save me for me. You saved me for you."
The accusation lands like a blade between my ribs, and the worst part is that I cannot deny it. Not entirely. Not when she is standing in front of me with her eyes full of all the ways I have failed her since the night she walked into my club and wrote her wish on a scrap of silk.
"I love you." The confession tears itself from my throat, raw and unplanned and the most honest thing I have ever said. "I know that does not fix anything. I know I have done everything wrong from the beginning. But I love you, Persia. Not as a contract or a solution or a means to an end. As a woman. As the only person who has ever made me feel like something other than a monster."
She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, I see the goodbye written there before she even speaks.
"Then let me go."
Smoke swirls between us, thick and acrid, stinging my eyes in ways that have nothing to do with tears I refuse to shed.
"Where will you go?" My voice does not sound like my own. "Your father cannot be trusted. Your friends are useless. Magnus's people will be looking for revenge. You cannot just?—"
"I have to." She releases my hand and takes another step back, widening the distance between us until it feels like miles. "If I stay with you now, after everything that just happened, I will never know if it is because I want to or because I have no other choice. And I cannot live like that anymore, Rafael. I cannot be one more thing in your collection of beautiful objects. I haveto find out who I am when I am not someone's daughter or someone's prize or someone's wife."
I watch her reach for her left hand, and my heart stops beating entirely.
The ring I gave her, the diamond and sapphires that marked her as mine, catches the firelight one last time before she slides it from her finger.
"Persia, don't?—"
She drops it at my feet.
The ring hits the ground between us with a sound that should not be so small for something that feels like it is destroying me from the inside out.
