“No. I don’t want to leave you. You’ve been dealing with all of this by yourself for all this time and—”
“You didn’t ask for this,” he said. “You were supposed to escape. Escape toxic families, and all of the other baggage that you grew up with, and here you have found that my family was worse than yours could ever be. It sounds as if your father is a sniveling coward. But one who would never ever get blood on his own hands. My father was dripping with it. I despise him. I… I am unclean. His blood is in my veins.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. But she still didn’t leave. She put her hands on his face. “I don’t know what to say because this is monumentally fucked up. Because there is no guideline or handbook for how to help somebody through this, but I’m here. I’m here. I’m not going to leave you.”
“You should.”
She looked at him, her green eyes measured. “We have an agreement. I promised you that I would stay married to you for at least two years, and I will keep that promise, King Ragnar. I will stay your queen. Because you can trust me. You can trust that I will do what I said, that I’m everything I appeared to be. I’m not lying to you. And I would never, ever betray you. I swear it.”
Her vows came from deep inside of her, and she understood them. They were nothing like the vows they had spoken to each other at the wedding, in a language that she didn’t comprehend.
She was promising to stay with him and… He had no idea how he was going to feel in five minutes, let alone over the next two years.
At the moment everything felt degraded. Destroyed.
He had been inside of her, and everything had felt good. For a moment, everything had felt so good it was like all of the walls inside of him had ceased to exist. And that was when the memories had come.
It was why he couldn’t afford to be too comfortable.
It had been a warning.
And he had let himself down by letting everything fall away when he was with her.
He had no one to blame for all of this but himself.
The truth is the truth, whether you know it or not.
Yes. That was true. He couldn’t deny it.
But he also couldn’t reconcile the terrible burden of knowing these things either.
It made him want to drain the blood from his veins.
It made him want to claw into his own skull and remove part of his brain. The part that knew these things.
He wanted to go back to the way things were.
He wanted to go back to not knowing them.
Then go back.
You don’t have to be open like this. You don’t need her. You don’t need anyone. And you sure as hell don’t need these memories.
Yes. He needed to get a grip on himself. He needed to go back to when he didn’t know.
He could rule the country that way.
He never had to think about this. He never had to acknowledge it. Yes, it would mean never finding his revenge, and there was something unsatisfying about that. But he would be a better king, a better man, if he didn’t have to face the reality of this.
He would go back. He would go back. He just needed to erect the barriers around his soul again.
That was like a memory too. This act of building up a wall inside of himself. Around those thoughts. Around everything that had happened.
He had done this once before, and he would do it again. He never had to think about this again. Not ever.
He never had to think about it again.
He stood up. “I will sleep in the other room tonight.”
