“My betrothed,” I say again, spitting each vowel and consonant as if they have personally offended me.
“It was a political arrangement,” Hex says hurriedly. “Made before the coup. It was never… there was nothing between us. We never…”
“He’s very pretty.”
“Adam.” Hex is squirming, actually squirming.
“Extraordinarily pretty, actually. That hair.”
Felix slurps his tea. His eyes ping-pong between Hex and me as if he is relishing every single moment and doesn’t want to miss a thing.
“It was a political arrangement that was rendered null and void by my exile,” Hex says, with the focused urgency of a man who understands that he is losing ground and cannot identify how to stop it. “His family will have reassigned him by now. Probably to Dis. It was never a real...”
“To Dis,” I say, and something in that lands differently, a small cold note underneath the jealousy. Fiend being handed to Dis as a political asset. The tiredness in his face in that last moment before he left.
“Adam.” Hex crosses the room to me and stops very close, close enough that I have to tilt my head up slightly to look at him, which he knows perfectly well and absolutely does on purpose. “There has never been anything between Fiend and me. There is nothing. There was never going to be anything. He and I understood each other perfectly and the arrangement was purely political and I need you to know that the only person in any realm that I… “
He stops.
I wait.
He looks at me with those red eyes and something in him is very unguarded in a way he usually isn’t, and I think about the kiss in the kitchen at four in the morning and the way he saidMy Lovedifferently from how he normally says it, saying it like it was something he’d been thinking for a long time.
“The only person,” I prompt.
His jaw tightens. “You know what I’m saying.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
It’s the same thing I said in the kitchen. He recognises it. Something shifts in his expression. Exasperation and warmth and something deeper than both, all at once.
“You,” he says. Simply. Just that. “Only you.”
I look at him for a long moment.
Felix settles back on the sofa. “Yep. Being third wheel sucks big time,” he mutters.
“Okay,” I say to Hex.
Because his explanation is reasonable and he is squirming, actually squirming and looking panicked and flustered that I might not believe him, and people don’t act like that if they don’t care.
Hex blinks. “Okay.”
“Don’t push your luck though. If it turns out you have a secret attic wife or husband, I’m dumping you.”
Something that is unmistakably relief moves across his face, chased immediately by the familiar edge of amusement. “Noted.”
“Good.” I pick up my tea. “Also, your ex is terrifying.”
“He’s not my ex.”
“Your almost-ex.”
“He’s not...”
“The hair, Hex. The hair alone.”
Felix, on the sofa, makes a sound into his tea that is almost certainly a laugh.
