It might seem cold to some. But he knew the truth. She would be better off without him near her.
It took about half of the plane ride for Fern to realize that she didn’t have her phone. She didn’t have any way of contacting anyone.
She had become so sporadic in her use of it that she hadn’t been carrying it with her when she had been out today. She hadn’t even touched it. But then the second thing that she realized was that she wasn’t really in regular contact with anyone outside of the convent. She didn’t have a network of people away from there. Of course, the sisters would do whatever they needed to to save her. She was confident in that. But she didn’t know how they would do it.
There was nothing that she could do. She was physically outmatched. The man was more mountain than human. And on top of that, he had a whole team of men on board the plane.
She wasn’t scared of him. Not physically. She knew exactly what King Ragnar had done when he had taken control back of his country. He’d dismantled the previous regime, sent the leaders to prison for the rest of their days.
He’d taken back the military—banishing all generals who opposed him.
He’d restored freedom that had been lost, abolished oppressive laws.
What he’d done had been for his people.
Which couldn’t be said about the man that her father had intended to marry her off to.
Ragnar was still older than her. Though in his thirties, she suspected. She thought of the way he had looked at her with those cold, ice-blue eyes. He wasn’t like the other president. He wasn’t like the other man she had been promised to. But itdidn’t make her any more thrilled about being a spoil of war. Or whatever he had decided that she was.
A chip to be used against her father. To keep him in line. She suddenly felt very small. Impossibly so. Because this had been her fate for as long as she had understood it. She was nothing more than a bargaining chip. She was nothing more than a conduit for something else. And she wanted to be firm. She wanted to be inconsequential. Yet somehow larger in herself.
It was such a strange thing. She could be a political figure. She could be the queen of this country, but that had so much less meaning to her than waking up in the morning and tending a farm. Collecting eggs. Gathering honey.
She suddenly felt bereft about the honey that was lying in what was likely a broken jar, somewhere away from the convent. A waste of what they cultivated.
Emblematic of the last three years of her life.
It meant nothing.
No. It meant something. You learned about yourself. You know who you are.
She bolstered herself with that.
She knew who she was and what she wanted. She knew more about herself now than she ever had, and she knew more about the world. Funnily enough by being removed from it.
She was not in the same position that she would’ve been if she had been married off to a dictator at eighteen.
What a strange thing, that in many ways Ragnar’s timing three years ago had saved her from something, and now he had come to collect.
She wasn’t prepared to be a queen.
She didn’t want to be trotted out all over the world, onstage, trussed up and living her life for public engagement.
And as the plane began to descend, she had a second thought.
She wasn’t prepared to be a wife.
That thought made her face suddenly grow hot, made her stomach clamp tight.
She had intentionally never thought about that.
She had been promised to a man that she didn’t want from her birth, so she didn’t think about marriage and intimacy, and the fact that she was meant to carry a dictator’s baby.
She didn’t think about it because it was important. Because it couldn’t be borne.
But now that she was here, on the edge of it, she couldn’t release the thought.
He wanted to marry her immediately. Like he had said, he could stand in the center of the throne room and simply pronounce them married and they would be.
