She didn’t look away from him. Couldn’t. “Carus, can you help me carry him to bed?”
Carus cleared his throat, and his gruff voice was softer when he replied, “Yeah, let’s go.”
Morgen didn’t protest this time, slinging one arm over Carus’ shoulder and wrapping the other around her. Imeria watched them go, a slant to her brow Nya couldn’t quite read. She would deal with figuring Imeria out later.
She would deal withallof this later, because that pain in her chest she had felt earlier, when they’d just emerged from the portal—that had been because Morgen was dying.She didn’t want to think about what it would feel like if he was actually gone.
“Alright,” Carus said under his breath as they rounded a corner, revealing a hammered metal door that had been constructed to fit the dimensions of the cavern entrance. “Here we are.”
He kicked it open with his foot, and they shuffled into a hollowed-out space containing a large bed, a desk covered in neat stacks of parchment and a few daggers, and a weapons rack in the corner. Very little about the room felt personal. Perhaps nothing, if it hadn’t been for the small wooden rack hanging just to the right of the desk.
From small hooks, mementos that would be meaningless to anyone else but her had been hung: a small leather pouch that contained river stones she had carefully selected, a string tied to the end of a long, blue-black feather, a page from a book folded to look like a dragon, and a woven crown of long-dried wildflowers that had sat atop her head on her twenty-fourth birthday.
Her chest tightened, and she blinked away the burning in her eyes, re-focusing on the task of helping Morgen onto the bed. Once he was flopped haphazardly across the mattress, Carus sat back against the wooden headboard with a sigh.
“Go on,” he said, adding with a wink. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t accidentally smother himself.”
But she didn’t smile, instead glancing at the rack of mementos again. Still, she stood, forcing herself to start walking to the door, but Morgen caught her wrist before she could get far.
Eyes half shut, he muttered, “Don’t go.”
She froze, blinking rapidly. It made her head spin, trying to reconcile the ruthless god who had forced her into a marriage and tricked her into an unbreakable bond with the man lying on the bed, begging her to stay with him. In the end, she couldn’t. But she couldn’t leave him like this either. So, she glanced at Carus and said, “Ah, I should probably stay. Just in case he freaks out again.”
Carus tilted his head. “Can I trust you not to attempt to murder him, or shall I remain here?”
She shrugged. “Even if I tried, he could easily stop me.”
“And if you managed to get the knife in him while he was asleep?”
Her lips twitched. “I doubt I could injure him in a way that was too fatal for his body to heal.”
Carus’ eyes flicked to Morgen’s throat for a split second and then back to her. “I doubt so too.” He scooted off the bed and strode to the door, stopping short just before he left. “Nya.”
She bit her cheek, flooding her mouth with the taste of copper. “What?”
Carus tipped his head back and let out a long breath. “Once he’s back to normal and you go back to lying to yourself and pretending you hate him, perhaps at least attempt to understand he has very little idea of how to properly treat someone he cares for. He’s balancing a lot right now—more than you know or could even understand—and he’s still trying.”
“Trying?”
“Not to let it go to his head. Not to be like his father.”
Her laugh was little more than a harsh puff of air. “He doesn’t have totry, because he’s never been anything like Kronos. I’ve never doubted that. I just hate that he lied to me.”
Carus stared at her for a long moment, his jaw working, but he didn’t say anything else about it. He just turned and left, the door closing quietly behind him. She sat on the edge of the bed, taking deep breaths, until her pulse slowed and her anger faded.
“You don’t have to do that, you know.”
She twisted, finding Morgen looking at her with half-lidded eyes. His words were still slightly slurred, his voice unguarded, so he clearly wasn’t himself yet. Still, she asked, “Do what?”
He shrugged, closing his eyes. “Lie to him. Carus has known me long enough that he understands the truth.”
“The truth?” Her voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper, but he heard it.
“My own mother didn’t even want me, up until the day I killed her by coming into this wretched world. I was born wrong, and nothing can fix that. Even as a child, I knew it.”
His voice was fading as he slipped closer to sleep. Nya took a deep breath and shook her head before curling into his chest and whispering, “No one chooses their life, not at first. The only thing that matters, the thing that makes us who we are, are the choices we make. I am very angry at you, Morgen, but…if you were anything like Kronos, you would have done much worse than use marriage to me as a political pawn. Men less evil than Kronos would have probably done unspeakable things to me the other night simply because they could.”
She was sure he was almost asleep, but he shuddered, his arms wrapping around her. This close, he smelled the same as she remembered and was just as warm. She could almost pretend nothing had changed between them.
