Page 135 of Queen of Nothing

My mouth twists, wobbling, wet. “My family—they don’t love me—”

“Olivia, don’t be naïve.” He sighs, soft. “You are our only peer who never realised that all children, all offspring, come second to the gods. Our duties are aligned with the gods. It does not mean your parents do not love you. They just understand the way it is, and you have never cared to comprehend that.”

“That’s not fair,” I say and fall back against the window. “I wasn’t raised the same way as you were, as Asta or Serena. I was diagnosed as a deadblood, and that meant I would be lucky to marry anyone. I didn’t have the same expectations pushed on me—and I was told to just accept it when my whole life got flipped upside-down.”

“So you ran.”

I fight the urge to meet his gaze. But I lose and I look.

The warning is sharp in those cold eyes.

He slips his hands into his pockets and, pushing off the desk, wanders to the window next to me. “It was two years before we got close enough to your trail to learn you were travelling with a child.”

A snivel hitches through me, and I frown up at him. “So?”

His gaze slides down to me. “That night in the blackout. We had no way of knowing whose child it was. I was relieved to learn that it was Serena’s bastard.”

Dray might have chased my contract once. But an out-of-wedlock child is not a good thing in this world. It’s so much more than the disgrace, the reputation, the shame—

It’s a child conceived and born outside of the bounds of rituals.

So I nod, faint, because I understand.

Yet another way my family worried that I disrespected the gods.

His reflection is faint on the windowpanes. “Would you do it again?”

“Do what?”

“Run.”

No.

That’s the answer that thrums in my bones, the instinctual response that curves my shoulders, because it was hell out there.

I never want to go back to that life.

Dray must have been watching me, watching my body tense against the idea, my face turn into a grimace, because he hums, satisfied, then turns his back to the window.

He leans on the frame.

“I want to go back,” I snivel through the words, and his glare flings down at me. “I want to go back to the start and everyone makes different choices. All the way to when I was born.”

His frown comes and goes, quickly.

And, like he understands what I’m saying, which he can’t possibly, he nods, faint. “I can’t deny that this would have gone differently for you if you hadn’t been born a deadblood.”

I shake my head, face twisting, because no. That’s not it. That’s not what I mean.

Dray doesn’t know that.

He can’t.

This secret stays hidden from him.

But he misreads me.

“Our relationship would have held through the academy. Life would have been easier for you. It would have gone differently. But it did not. And all the magic in the world cannot change that. So stop wallowing, Olivia.”