Chapter thirty-four
Marco: Fatal Vow
Robin’s barely left my side all this last week, ever since I scooped him off the floor outside Evander’s surgery and brought him home with me.
He didn’t argue, or fight with me to stay in the dungeon that night, to keep up appearances. He came broken and exhausted, and like he’d left a piece of himself there.
Every day it’s been all I can do to try to rebuild him. Us.
We go back there each morning, of course we do. There’s work to be done, matches, besides our own, to prepare for. But we’re done sneaking around, keeping this a secret from the men. It doesn’t matter anymore what the remaining few think, or what the guards might say, because they all know it can’t last.
This time tomorrow, one of us will be dead.
Our last remaining hours are to be spent at the villa, just like every other spare moment has been. A rotation of meals taken together, baths where I hold him close and while away hours in steamy serenity. Nights here he’s mine and I’m his. Where, in the dark safety of our own room, I can tell him all the things I wish I’d told him from the start.
All that time we wasted. And now it’s almost gone.
Today, lying on my lawn as if we’ll both see this world again, it’s me and Robin, and this vast blue sky that’s so hard to imagine stretching over Atrea too. Hard to imagine this is the same sun that beats down upon that lost land. Harder even to think that one week from now I could be standing on its shores again. Seeing my mother, my father, my brother.
How they must have aged. How tall Lucas must be. Robin says he grew almost as tall as me. My little baby brother.
Yet even as my heart breaks for them, for the lines the misery of my loss must have etched into my parents’ faces, that same idea turns over in the back of my mind: what if it wasn’t Robin I were to face tomorrow? Would I stay if I won? Could I stand four more years?
I could teach Robin everything I know in that time. I could study the men he’s to kill, help him learn their weaknesses, help him fight his way through until he’s free too. I could get a job as a guard at the dungeon, see him every day.
At night, Evander could let me in, take me to him.
I wonder, could I handle it? Four more years of the dark of that dungeon. Could I bear to never see the sun under my own terms in all that time?
But when Robin shifts his head in my lap, when the folds of golden hair splay across my hand, I’m sure, in my heart, he is all the sunshine I need. That I’ll ever need.
My soul wants to cry out at how unfair it is. But it’s simply life. There is no fair or unfair. There is just fate and where it sweeps you, and the bitter knowledge that nothing, for as long as I live, will be so precious as these last few moments with Robin.
His eyes follow white clouds through long, delicate lashes, and his lips are as soft and fresh as a new dawn. But his brow’s dark.
Why wouldn’t it be? We both know what’s coming. Yet nothing’s changed. Not since I combed his beautiful hair on the floor of the gym. Not since he stood before the Emperor in that grand ballroom and blockedhis path, protected me from him. Not since he held me down and claimed me as his.
It was always Robin. It was always going to be Robin.
Star-crossed.
I touch fingertips to his brow, smoothing it, and he starts, as if he’d been too deep in thought to realize where we were.
“Are you worried about Cas?” I ask him.
Even after all the effort Evander’s taken to save him, Cas is likely to die today. He took a fever a few days back, and Evander’s watching him round the clock. Robin’s begged him to call us to the dungeon if it looks irretrievable.
“I am,” Robin says. “Though he’ll be better off if he passes, most likely. He won’t have to deal with this place anymore.”
My heart goes out to him, tight with the hard edge of his speech. If he kills me tomorrow, that’s two losses in as many days. The two people closest to him. And after that, he has no choice but to fight on, for Esme.
She’s down at the pond, splashing with Maria, perfectly ignorant of our entwined fate.
Robin couldn’t stand to tell her. His eyes settle on her now, as if he’s thinking all the same thoughts I am.
“Marco,” he says softly.
I let my fingers glide across his cheek, savoring the last touch of him. But the emotion quickly becomes too much, the knowledge it’s the end, so I dig my hand into the grass instead. “What is it?”
