A sly smile tugged at his lips. “No.”
I gasped. “Sebastian!” I slapped his arm.
He chuckled, feigning surrender. “Our fake courting was torturous because of all I had to hold back. A touch, a kiss, telling you how beautiful you are. I didn’t know if I’d ever get a real opportunity to ask for your hand, so I wanted to at least pretend, get some semblance of what it might be like.”
My lips parted at his admittance, at all he laid before me, trusting me with its fragility. I knew I’d ruin the moment, but I couldn’t hold back my grin. “And that’s the proposal you came up with?”
He barked out a laugh, something I had never heard from him or expected from the stone-faced Sebastian. I almost started to believe he was incapable of such a thing.
“I didn’t want to scare you away by being too forward. Especially with not knowing how you felt. You made it clear from the beginning that you never saw a future with me, not that I blamed you. We are from two different worlds, and you come from one that views vampires as a plague.”
My heart ached at the idea of him feeling rejected by me, at him longing for me in secret as I did for him.
I trailed my fingertips along his cheekbone. “Does that mean we also didn’t really need to pretend to be engaged in Svealin?”
He winced slightly.
I gasped, and he flinched, waiting for the slap. I tangled my fingers in his hair instead.
“Hmm, it seems we have both kept a lot hidden from each other,” I murmured.
“We won’t have to worry about that anymore.”
My eyes rounded as I remembered. The soulmate bond created a link between our emotions. I grappled with this new reality of not being able to guard my feelings, the sudden exposure leaving me hung out in the open.
He shot me a wicked grin. “I warned you, killer. Every spell comes at a price.”
I sighed, hiking my leg around his hip. “I suppose that’s for the best. Think of all we have missed keeping how we have truly felt from one another.” Unspoken feelings decayed beneath the surface, leaving the stable ground to rot away.
And I hoped I could find a way to free all that I kept buried. I had a feeling it would need to be soon, that I wouldn’t be able to hide from my world for much longer.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I laid on my side facing Olivia until her eyes fluttered open, and when I saw the placid surface of indigo, I knew she was ready to emerge through the surface.
“How can I possibly mend myself together when the edges are so mangled?” Olivia’s voice was weak and rough from disuse.
“If you have edges, you can be mended.”
The faintest smile crossed her lips before fading back within her fallen features. I ran my hand through her golden hair, careful not to snag the tangles.
“You will get through this, and we will rid the world of vampires.” Those last words cemented themselves within my throat because that now included me.
What hurt worse was that she didn’t know she was about to lose someone else she loved, and I didn’t know how to tell her. I didn’t know if I even could.
What would truly break me would be to see the shift within the indigo. The moment she saw me as a demon. The moment she knew her sister was gone.
* * *
That night as I headed to my room for bed, Olivia was in much better spirits. Well, her spirit still seemed far from her, but she was at least talking to everyone now. The moment I entered my room, I halted just beyond the threshold. A chill hung in the air, not the kind that came with the waning summer but the one that hailed from a final breath.
I saw it on my pillow. A letter.
You’ve broken your promise, sweet dove, and I have waited long enough.
I had asked for a week, but it had taken just over two for me to develop control and confidence in my control. Alaric’s thinly veiled threat preceded an address. An energy hummed beneath my chest, right up against my rib cage, a muted rapping. The guilt thumped around me like a phantom dragging its feet across a weathered floor. With our soulmate bond, Sebastian was with me always, and the pain of lying to him was akin to a thousand methodically placed cuts across my body that measured up to a dull ache, the sum would drain me eventually.
I was not sure what would happen if I met Alaric, but I was more afraid to see what would happen if I didn’t. And there was no way Sebastian would ever let me go. With our bond, it was uncomfortable to be apart, like a scratch beneath the skin I could never reach. It would become easier overtime, but for now, our absence from each other was a fresh wound. I told him I needed to spend time with Olivia. I knew Alaric would show up at some point. He always came to collect. But I’d rather that happened when Sebastian was long gone. Too far to stop me. And the rapping grew incessant.
