The words land in the center of my chest. There they cave, joy splitting through me first. Hot. Golden. Blinding. Fear follows, a terror so sharp it makes my throat lock up because…he agreed to kill me.
I don’t speak. I can’t. Instead, I reach for him, hands finding his jaw, pulling his mouth down to mine.
The kiss is slow at first. Trembling. Tasting of salt and the sleepless hours behind his eyes. His hand slides from my cheek into my hair, cradling my skull, and the low, broken sound he makes against my lips undoes something in my chest.
I pull him closer. He resists for half a heartbeat, then gives, his weight sinking onto the edge of the bed, one knee pressing into the mattress beside my hip. The blanket is still tangled around my legs, and I kick at it blindly, needing the barrier gone, needing less between us.
His mouth finds the hollow of my throat, where he whispers, “I love you.”
My head falls back against the pillow, fingers raking through those black curls, and the sound I make is neither brave nor queenly. It’s the sound of a woman who almost lost this. A woman who is still terrified of what comes next but refuses to waste the now on fear.
“Elara…” He breathes my name into my collarbone, his lips dragging a slow, devastating line toward my shoulder. His hand finds my hip through the thin shift, gripping hard, pulling me flush against him.
Heat builds between us with a speed that’s almost violent. Weeks of grief and argument and longing compressed into theurgent crush of his mouth, the slide of his palm up my thigh, the way my back arches off the bed to chase the friction. I hook my leg around his hip and feel him—hard, straining, his breath hitching into something ragged against my skin.
My fingers fumble with the buttons of his coat. One. Two. My hand slips beneath, finding the warm, solid expanse of his chest, and his entire body shudders.
“I want you,” I whisper against his mouth. “Before we do this. I need?—”
“No.” He pulls back.
Not far. Just enough to look at me, his chest heaving, his pupils blown so wide the green is barely a ring. His hand is still on my thigh, trembling with the effort of stopping.
“If I have you now,” he says, his voice wrecked, “there’s no force in this realm or any other that will make me slit your throat after.”
The honesty of it lands like a fist. Not cruelty. Not denial. Just the raw, terrified truth of a man who knows the gore of what will come next.
I close my eyes. Breathe. Let the heat settle into something I can carry rather than something that consumes.
“Then we should go,” I whisper. “Before we both change our minds.”
He exhales a long, unraveling breath and presses his lips to my forehead. They linger there. One second. Three. Five. As though he’s memorizing the feel of my skin.
“I already told Miss Hampshire to ready the blade.”
“Oh…” My stomach drops. “You thought this through, huh?”
“Would you like to eat first?” He studies me, head tilted, as though genuinely considering the logistics of a pre-sacrifice breakfast. “Find an appropriate dress?”
I sit up, the shift falling off one shoulder where his mouth had pushed it. “Who eats breakfast before their slaughter?” Ishove the blanket off my legs. “And no dress is appropriate if it’ll get bloodied, anyway.”
That softening in his jaw again. That almost-smile that’s become my favorite thing on his borrowed, stupidly handsome face. “Indeed.”
Before my feet find the cold floor, his arms are under me. One beneath my knees, the other cradling my back, lifting me from the bed with ease. I loop mine around his neck, pressing my cheek to his shoulder, and I can feel the faint vibration of his heartstrings humming against me.
Two strings. Soon to be three.
“I just want to hold you for a while,” Vale says, carrying me through the doorway, the hallway beyond pale and still.
A maid rounds the corner, sees the king carrying his queen, who is wearing only a nightgown, and flattens herself against the wall with a clumsy curtsy. Vale nods at her as though it’s perfectly ordinary.
I press closer to him. “I’m scared.”
His lips find my temple. “Whatever happened to ‘Dying is easy,’ my love?”
A startled laugh escapes me, bright and too loud, echoing off the stone and coming back sounding almost like courage. “Shut up.”
It starts in my hands, that tremble when the double doors of the throne room loom ahead. Travels inward. Coils behind my sternum until breathing becomes impossible. Dizziness fogs my mind, whirling up those first roots of panic.
