“I hate that about you.”
My chest hitches, because he doesn’t sound like he means that. He sounds like he’s pleading with me. “Too bad,” I say. “It’s my favorite thing about myself.”
He steps closer, forcing me to crane my head. His gaze burns as brightly as the stars, and it travels downward, a caress across the hollow of my throat. It’s the first time he’s seen that part of me, I realize, and a shiver coasts along my skin as I pull the dressing gown around my neck.
But that only diverts his focus back upward, to my mouth. My lips tingle, as if his attention has weight, heat.
“Shadows take me,” he says. “You’re beautiful. I think I hate that even more.”
My breath fails entirely. Ishanna’s blood, but he’s well and truly drunk. Clearly. And yet this might be the first honest conversation we’ve ever had.
“Good,” I murmur. “I hate you, too.”
A glint warms his eyes. “Why? Because I’m beautiful?”
My throat seals itself shut. I didn’t mean it that way, and yet I can’t help but catalog the details I’ve refused to see before—the symmetry of his features, the hard cut of his jaw, the way starlight clings to the planes of his face as if desperate to know what they feel like. His mouth, somehow both brutal and soft…
I drag my gaze away before I can finish the thought.
But that doesn’t silence the quiet detonation taking place beneath my skin. I think I’ve known he’s beautiful, on some level, since he first strode through my father’s receiving hall. I’ve just never let myself acknowledge it, never let the word form fully in my mind.
After all, beautiful things shouldn’t tear people from their homes. They shouldn’t send their mates into deadly forests.
The king standing before me has done both. He’s both beautiful and terrible, and I hate that my treacherous body doesn’t seem to know the difference.
“I don’t hate you because of what you look like,” I say. “I hate you because you ruined my life.”
“Mmm. I did. And I won’t apologize for it.”
A bitter laugh scrapes at my throat. “Good. I don’t want you to. If you’re going to destroy me for your own selfish purposes, at least have the conviction to stand by it.”
He leans in, blocking out the starlight. “I do.”
“Then I hope, when this is all over, it will have been worth it for you.”
An endless pause stretches between us. “It won’t. Chances are, you won’t succeed.”
I pull back, stung. Not that I don’t already know that, but… “If that’s really what you believe, then why’d you choose me? Why’d you evenbring mehere?”
A laugh drips from his lips, this one familiar, tinged with cruelty. “Because. I had no choice.”
My jaw locks. He said as much the night he fought the Shadow, and I didn’t agree with him then any more than I do now. “Of course you did. You could’ve left me alone. You could’ve let me stay in Aethrolia.”
He scoffs. “Is that what you think? That I could’ve spent two hundred years trying to find you, only to turn around andleave again when I did? Do you think any man has ever done such a thing, in the history of the fae? In the history of mate bonds? Do you really think I could have smelled that incredible fucking smell just once, and never again?”
My lips part, his words stunning me into silence. I try to drag my gaze from his, but I can’t. I can only wait beneath his stare, entirely at his mercy. “I… But… You just said you hate me.”
He snorts. His eyes bore into mine. “Yes. I hate how beautiful you are. I hate your stubbornness. I hate how fiery and determined you are.”
I don’t speak. I don’t know that I even breathe. “Is that all?”
He exhales through his nose. “No. I hate that you aren’t afraid of me. I hate how you make me feel, the things you make me think about. I hate that my Shadow hurt you. That I had to wonder whether you were all right for eight days. I especially hate that whenever you’re around, some dead thing inside me tries to hope. I hate that I have to kill that part of myself, over and over. Drown it at the bottom of a bottle.”
My heart does a somersault—trying to escape him, or close the gap between us, I can’t tell. Maybe both. “What’s wrong with hope?”
“What isn’t?” He practically bends the words in half, he loads them with so much disdain. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, you learn how dangerous hope is, how cruel. Because nothing hurts like hope does, Princess.Nothing.”
A tragic chord rings through me. How gut-wrenching, to think he’s never once had a dream come true. That every wish he’s ever made has slipped through his fingers, leaving him broken and alone and afraid to long for anything different.
