The steel edge of his voice didn’t waver. Didn’t break. Horror wrapped around my ribs and squeezed.
“I lost the freedom of being myself long ago. I am bound to my Command. I have nothing and no one outside of that.” A muscle feathered in his jaw as he held my gaze. “Had. Or so I thought for a fleeting moment. Until you shattered that illusion. Now the sentiment is the same once again. I am here because it is my obligation, as your mate, to take care of you. Whether you want me or not.”
Because for him, duty would always defeat desire.
An ache, so acute I thought I’d punctured a lung, dug between my ribs. It took a sharply inhaled breath to realize it wasn’t my own. Vaeron’s walls had crumbled to dust as he bared the most vulnerable shards of his soul. He wasn’t hiding anything.
Even his own grief over how I’d treated him.
“I hear you, Sylaira. I am the villain in your eyes. The monster who always lurked, just out of sight, ready to take everything from you. Hate me all you want. I will continue to be by your side, because there is nowhere else I can be.” He flattened a palm over his chest, right where his bond lived. A mirror position to my own.
I pressed my hand over my magic, feeling the hard pound of my heart alongside it.
“There’s nowhere else I want to be. But I may not get a choice once we return to Sivy. I hope this Goddess-gifted magic can accept that. It seems to have a mind of its own.” None of the seriousness Vaeron wore like a cloak lifted, but the barest twitch of his lips told me he was trying to make light of our heavy situation.
The chain yanked us into proximity, time and time again, begging us to touch, to kiss, to do anything that would lead to us having sex and solidifying what our Radiant Mother had already deemed to be true.
Perhaps we had more in common than I was prepared toadmit. Perhaps he was as much a prisoner as me. Perhaps the abuse of his father had him believing that he had no other choices than the ones he made.
And those glimmers of good he’d offered me? The rescue of Ilae’s clutch, the removal of tithes in his svaethi, the kindness he’d shown the first innkeeper, it all made me think that possibly, deep down, he wasn’t as evil as I’d once thought.
Centuries of life tended to make one complicated. I had no shortage of that in myself either.
But if he wasn’t evil, if he wasn’t a monster…what did that make me? Cruel, for plotting to gain power over him and manipulate him for my own gain?
I had committed no violence, and yet, I had done exactly what his father had.
The thought churned bile in my gut.
“Thank you. For sharing all of that. For acknowledging my pain,” I murmured.
He held my gaze then, allowing me to see all the facets of him. I hated that part of me wanted to lean forward and rest my head against his chest, just to see if the beat of his heart could drown out the chaos in my mind.
But I couldn’t.
Because if I did, I couldn’t lie to him—or myself—anymore.
So, instead, I leaned back.
And Vaeron walked away.
30
Three days from Sivy. Three days from seeing Heraphia again. Three days from entering a gilded cage, never to be free again.
That was the march of my thoughts as the cart trundled along, forced to slow behind a line of traders making the trek through the dense Eso Forest. My shoulder bumped into Vaeron’s, but I didn’t twist away.
Instead, my mind returned, once again, to our conversation the previous night. The vulnerability he’d shared. The pain he’d acknowledged in me.
How all along, I’d been digging into his deepest wound, and he had no idea.
Manipulating him felt…wrong. Like I’d leaped into a spiral only to land crooked, feet crashing where precision should have lived.
And I didn’t like myself for it now that Vaeron had shared a sliver of his trauma. For there was much I didn’t know, of that Iwas certain. One didn’t simply accept a scar like his upon a singular event.
Yet he didn’t know all of mine either. We were frozen lakes, and our surfaces had scarcely cracked beneath the weight of the fate thrust upon us.
He held himself behind a wall of ice; I held myself behind a thundercloud.
