Ronan rarely pushed conversations further than necessary. When he did, it meant he had already considered every angle.
“And what would that be?” I asked.
He studied me for a moment before answering.
“Her trust.”
A quiet laugh escaped me.
“Trust,” I repeated.
The word sounded almost absurd in this world.
Trust was a luxury few men in our position could afford, but Ronan was not wrong.
Trust would change everything.
If Sera trusted me, she would stop fighting the inevitable.
She would stop seeing me only as the man who destroyed her father and begin seeing what she could become beside me.
I turned back toward the city lights.
“And you are still obsessed with her,’” Ronan added.
Obsessed.
Perhaps that was the correct word.
Most men would have seen Sera as a threat. A liability.
The daughter of a rival family, raised in power, surrounded by secrets.
Many would have eliminated that threat quickly and cleanly, but the moment I first saw her after her father’s death, I knew she would never belong anywhere else.
“She is not fragile,” I said again quietly.
“She is wounded,” Ronan corrected.
That was true.
The loss of her father had carved something deep into her.
Grief like that changed people. It either broke them or forged them into something far more dangerous.
Sera had not been broken.
Even now, surrounded by my men and my empire, she still carried that fierce defiance in her eyes.
She challenged me, questioned me, resisted me, and I found myself wanting to see just how far that fire could burn.
Ronan shifted slightly beside me.
“You should give her time,” he said.
“I am.”
“You kissed her.”
