I follow her, my footsteps heavier than hers on the stone path.
She moves with an ease that feels foreign to me, like she’s never had to watch her back walking into a room.
The garden smells like roses and freshly turned earth.
Sunlight glances off the fountain in the center, throwing shards of light into the shadows.
She stops near a bed of white roses and turns to face me. “So. My parents tell me you’re the man I’m supposed to marry.”
I study her face, waiting for the bitterness, the disappointment. It doesn’t come. She’s not mocking me. She’s just… stating it.
“So I’ve heard,” I say.
Her gaze flicks over my face, then to my hands—knuckles still raw and bloody from the fight. “You’ve been boxing?”
I almost laugh.
I would hardly call the kind of fighting I do something as tame as boxing.
When it comes to the Irish fighting pits, just about anything goes. “Something like that.”
“I like it,” she says, and my brows lift before I can stop them.
“You like… what?”
“That you came as you are. No pretending. No hiding the fact that you were somewhere else, doing something you actually care about.”
Her words catch me off guard more than any punch I’ve taken.
I don’t know if she realizes how rare that is—someone in our world who isn’t wearing a mask.
“I didn’t exactly have time to change,” I say dryly.
“Would you have?” she asks. “If you had the time.”
I pause. “Probably not.”
She smiles again, and something about it feels like it’s peeling back my layers, inch by inch.
Leaving me exposed and vulnerable like I haven’t felt since I was a kid.
“Good,” she says softly.
We stand there for a moment, the sounds of the fountain filling the quiet. I’m not used to silences that don’t feel like a threat.
“You don’t have to say yes, you know,” I say suddenly.
That seems to surprise her, and her delicate brows lift in an expression of genuine confusion. “I’m pretty sure our families have already come to an agreement.”
“They have,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t walk away.”
I see a flicker of self-doubt cross her face, and she bites her lip. “Is that what you want? To walk away?”
If someone had asked me ten minutes ago, the answer would have been yes.
But now, I’m not so sure. “My brother needs your family’s support if we’re going to win the war that’s coming.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to marry someone you don’t want to marry,” she says softly, trapping her full lower lip between her straight white teeth.
