I looked up. Her expression was calm but unmistakably fond.
“By the third day, I was running comparative analyses to determine whether my attachment to Dravok was a neurochemical artifact or a legitimate emotional bond.”
“And?” I asked.
Nadine’s mouth curved in a rare, genuine smile. “And I was in love with him.”
Ella laughed.
“Honestly, I think it took me about as long.”
I stared at them both. “You’re serious.”
“Completely,” Ella said.
She leaned closer, her eyes warm with understanding. “I know it sounds impossible. I kept telling myself there was no way I could fall in love that quickly. On Earth, we’re taught that love is supposed to take time. That it has to build slowly and follow a certain order.”
“Forget what you learned about values,” Nadine cut in dryly.
Ella blinked.
“Oh. Right.” She gave me an apologetic, wry grin. “You’re not from Earth.”
A reluctant smile tugged at my mouth. Ella squeezed my hand.
“So forget whatever your people taught you. Forget whatever rules you think love is supposed to follow.” Her expression softened. “It doesn’t matter.”
She glanced at Nadine, then back at me. “When you know, you just know.”
The simple certainty in her voice unraveled the last of my resistance. Growing up in the Temple, love had never been a real consideration. It was a word whispered between girls after lights-out, passed from one hopeful dreamer to another likecontraband. Something soft and foolish and utterly irrelevant to the lives the Sythari had planned for us.
What did we know about love?
Nothing.
We were not raised to choose our mates. We were not even raised to believe we deserved affection. By the stars, we had never even known the love of a parent. No mother had tucked us into bed. No father had told us we were precious simply because we existed.
The only love we possessed was the fragile loyalty we offered one another, and even that was constantly undermined. The priests cultivated competition with ruthless precision. Bloodlines determined status. Status determined value. And value determined how useful we were.
Not to ourselves. To the Sythari. To them, we were assets to be traded, polished, and sacrificed.
And with the rebels...
I wasn’t even certain how to define what I felt for Kael’Varyn. When his distress call had come through, a sharp pain had ripped through me so fiercely I could barely breathe. Terror. Grief. The desperate certainty that I could not lose him. I had run toward danger without hesitation.
Was that love?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps it was the fierce attachment of an abandoned child to the first person who had ever made her feel safe. Kael’Varyn had given me freedom. He had believed in me when I barely believed in myself. He had become the closest thing I had ever known to family, though I had never been emotionally literate enough to understand that.
I had known him for five years.
Five years of trust, loyalty, and hard-won affection.
But what I felt for Thyros was different on so many levels, it was not even in the same galaxy. Because I did know. I knew in the way my pulse steadied when Thyros walked into a room. In the way the jagged pieces inside me quieted when he looked at me as though I were something precious rather than broken.
In the way his pain felt like my own.
