"No," I said. "I am not something you set aside and return to when it suits you."
I held his eyes. "I am not a book you place on a shelf and pick up when you feel like it. Shelved books get taken, Colsar. By anyone who wants them."
He looks at me as though he has been struck. “Do not say that,” he says, low. The pressure eased, leaving the room slowly until it was only air again. “I love you,” he said. The words sounded raw. “You are everything to me. I cannot lose you. Whatever you want, Asharin. You always get it. I will do anything to keep you.”
My answer came easily. “I will not be this. The woman who waits and wonders.” I almost laughed because I sounded more certain than I felt. All I truly want is for him to want me, to need me, like before.
Jessamy laughed softly. “You see?” she murmured. “Even now she rages while you look at me.”
Colsar moved before her voice had fully faded. His hand closed around her throat. There was a flash of power.
When he released her, Jessamy collapsed to the marble floor. The silence that followed felt enormous. Colsar turned toward the doors.
“Bring in the Duke.”
I do not understand the purpose. He would not kill him. Colsar was a Rathmor. Politics and practicality always took precedence. It had to.
Anything else would mean?—
The guards obeyed immediately. Jessamy’s father, the Duke of Larafyn, entered moments later with his escort.
He stopped the moment he saw her body. “My lord,” he whispered.
For a fraction of a second, I could see something calculated behind Colsar’s eyes. The Kyvarins. The negotiations. The place this man held at the edge of it all. Then it disappeared. Colsar looked at me as he descended the steps slowly. “For you,” he said.
The Duke barely had time to draw breath before Colsar reached him. His hand closed at the man’s throat and crushed. Bone gave under the pressure. The body dropped before the echo of it finished sounding.
The guards shouted. Steel tore free from scabbards.
Colsar did not turn. “For you,” he murmured again.
Something in him breaks open. Heat surges through the room and his form tears into something larger, darker, the shift taking him in a single violent motion.
He is on them before the first blade clears. A body hits the marble. Then another. He moves through them without pause, each strike final, each man falling before the next can react. By the time the last tries to raise his weapon, it is already over.
He stands among the bodies, breathing once, then looks at me again.
“For you,” he said softly.
I did not step back. I should have been horrified. Any reasonable woman would have been. Yet as I looked at him standing therein the ruin he had made for me, something colder and more complicated moved through my chest.
He had not hesitated. Not once. The court, the alliances, the fragile balance of power that held the kingdom together. None of it had mattered. Only me.
Colsar lifted his eyes to mine. “What else?” he asked quietly.
The doors opened again. The Sovereign entered. He stopped when he saw the carnage spread across the marble floor. His gaze moved from Jessamy to her father, then across the fallen guards.
Finally he looked at me, then at Colsar. After a long silence he turned toward the witnesses gathering uncertainly at the doorway. “The Duke and his daughter were discovered plotting betrayal,” he said calmly.
“King Colsar executed them to make an example.”
He held Colsar’s eyes. “As his first act as Sovereign.”
Colsar said nothing. The Sovereign stepped closer, surveying the bodies. “You have refused the throne long enough,” he said mildly.
“Apparently the matter has resolved itself.” He clapped a hand against Colsar’s shoulder.
Then he glanced once more at the blood darkening the marble. “Now clean up your fucking mess, Colsar.”
