“Best not to tell anyone,” he added, lowering his voice as if sharing a dangerous secret. “I do have a reputation to uphold.”
For a breath, the banter softened the edges of the night. But then Amerei’s lashes lowered, her voice falling to a whisper.
“I can’t feel him.”
The playfulness drained from Xavien’s face. He leaned closer, searching her expression. “What do you mean?”
She shook her head, staring at the blanket clenched in her fists.
“The tether—it’s gone quiet. I reach for him, but there’s nothing.”
Her eyes closed, a tear sliding down her cheek.
“I don’t believe he’s dead. I won’t.”
Xavien’s throat tightened.
Slowly, carefully, he brushed the tear away with the back of his hand.
“Then we will not believe it,” he said, as if sheer will could keep the truth at bay.
At first she clung to his words, to the steadiness in his voice. But the silence pressed in—the hush of lanterns guttering low, the drip of the fountain, the whole garden beyond his window listening. Her breath shuddered.
“But if he is dead, Xavien—”
Her voice broke.
“If I go back to Fyreglade, I endanger them all. His men. My people. Zeporah may be gone, but her spies aren’t. If they know he’s fallen…”
She shook her head hard, tears spilling.
“I cannot go back. Not to Rhidian. Not anywhere.”
Her words pierced him.
He had told himself he wanted her because it was wise to want her—because uniting the realm was his mother’s dream, because crown and bloodline made it inevitable. He had carried the thought of her like a banner, distant and dutiful.
But now—after only days in her presence—he knew better.
The sound of her laughter with his daughters, the fire in her Senate speech, even her grief now, trembling and unguarded—he was undone.
This was not strategy.
It was love, sudden and helpless, and it burned through him more fiercely than any vow he had ever made.
“Then you will stay here,” he said, low and desperate. “With me. No harm will touch you while I draw breath.”
She sobbed harder.
“Your wife will return. She will chase me from Amethyst—”
His smile was bitter steel.
“She’ll have to get through the gates first.”
He tugged the blanket higher, smoothing it where her hands still quaked.
Too close.
