Chapter 36 #2
He shook his head. “No. Or maybe, I suppose, in the simple way that the very young think of love.” He took a deep breath.
“We shared kisses and held hands, and we were just old enough to begin toying with more. But she asked me to tell her my secrets first, as a gesture of my devotion.” He paused. “So I did.”
“Oh no,” I whispered, starting to sense the path this particular tragedy had taken.
“I told her I was afraid of Osric and afraid Void House would be destroyed if I made a mistake. That I hated killing people and despised the role I’d been born into, and I was afraid someday I wouldn’t have any kind of heart left at all.
I said I dreamed of running away, and maybe we could run away together.
” He recited it flatly, like he was confessing a list of crimes.
“What did she say?” I asked, briefly lifting my hand from his cheek to tuck a lock of hair behind his ear.
He turned his face into the touch, and his lips brushed my wrist. “She thanked me for being honest with her. And then she went to tell Osric everything I had said.”
My stomach dropped.
“He summoned me,” Kallen continued, “and I’ll never forget seeing her standing by his side, grinning.”
“He probably forced her to do it,” I said, scrambling for any poultice to apply to this ancient, awful hurt.
“You think I don’t know that?” His voice grew sharp, but then he closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. “But she meant it, too. She’d always told me she wanted to be a great lady. Feared and respected, with influence in the flick of her fingers. And Osric was the one who could give that to her.”
A child betraying another child for the sake of power. I couldn’t imagine how that had felt to live through. “Did he hurt you?” I whispered.
His eyes flew open as he made a raw sound. “Of course he did. And then he handed me a dagger and told me to kill my heart, because he never wanted to hear about it burdening me ever again.”
“Kallen.” His name was knocked out of me on a horrified exhalation.
“She begged and cried,” he said, gaze gone distant. “But Osric didn’t need another great lady in his court. He needed a weapon. So I did as he commanded, and then I stopped trying to have a heart.”
Forced to kill his first love. Someone just as young and vulnerable as him, too, because as much as I wanted to hate that girl for what she had done, I refused to hate a child for the choices forced on them by the environment they grew up in.
Kallen had dedicated his later life to saving children. I wondered if he even recognized that parallel.
“So you see,” he said, grief written over his face, “I destroy everything, and I always have. And the only thing I want more than you…is for you to be safe.”
It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to me—and one of the saddest, too. I moved my hands to his chest, curving my palm over the beat of his heart like I could protect it. “It wasn’t your fault,” I told him. “What you did to her—there was no other choice.”
He shook his head. “That’s the excuse I’ve given again and again over my long life. That all my evil is either justified or something I’m helpless against. But there’s always a choice.”
“And what choice did you have back then? Or any other time Osric ordered you to commit an atrocity?”
“To die.” He said it like it was indisputable: the sun rose in the east and set in the west, time moved forward no matter how we might wish it to stop, and the answer to every wrong was for Kallen to die. “If I’d had the courage to end it at the beginning, how many lives would have been saved?”
“None,” I snapped, furious at the idea. “Or some would have been saved and others would be dead, because that’s who Osric was. He would have found another weapon, and that one wouldn’t have been a reluctant one.”
There was a drowning look in his eyes, desperate for the shore. “You don’t know that,” he whispered.
“I do,” I said fiercely. “And what would Osric have done to Void House if you’d killed yourself? What would have happened to the changelings? What would have happened to me ?” The Princess of Blood would have had a very short reign without his protection or his lessons.
He didn’t reply, but his lips were parted around ragged breaths as he stared at me like I was that distant shore.
“So, no,” I said, stepping even closer to him, my full skirts rustling against his legs.
“I’m not going to run away. I’m not going to judge you for killing that girl.
Because I know you, and you aren’t going to hurt me, and you’re far more than what you’ve been forced to do.
” He started to protest, so I barreled on.
“I know there will be crimes in your past that aren’t as clear-cut.
I know . I’m here anyway, and I’m not leaving, because you—” My breath hitched.
“You’re wonderful, Kallen. You’re thoughtful and protective and you fight , long past when most people would have given up. I refuse to let you go.”
There. I’d laid my heart out in offer, and he just needed to be brave enough to accept it.
Candlelight flickered around us. The silence felt thick. I waited, looking up at him with mingled hope and terror.
Kallen blinked, a slow sweep of lashes. Then he shuddered all over, as if shaking off some awful creature that had been clinging to him.
And then he grabbed my waist, leaned down, and kissed me.
Radiant sparks burst inside me at the press of his lips. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him back, overwhelmed by both joy and sorrow. Sorrow for what he had suffered; joy because this embrace was a promise. Kallen was done running from me.
Our first kiss had been frantic, an explosion of need so intense it had become nearly violent. This was different. No less intense, but deeper, slower, more . Kallen kissed me like he wanted to consume me. His tongue slipped inside my mouth, and he groaned when I met him with a stroke of my own.
He backed me up, and my hips hit the writing desk, making pens rattle.
Without breaking the kiss, Kallen swept the surface clean.
The vase holding the rose shattered, and glass crunched underfoot as he picked me up and set me on the desk.
I fumbled with his buckle, and his belt and knives thumped to the floor.
I spread my thighs wider as he crowded into me, and as our bodies pressed together, we let out matching moans.
“Kenna,” he panted, burying his face in my neck. “I don’t—”
“Don’t what?” I asked, near delirious with desire as he kissed up my throat.
“I don’t know how anything can feel this good,” he said against my fluttering pulse. “I don’t know how to survive it.”
I plunged my hands into his hair again, pulling him back to my mouth. My hips rocked, and he slapped a hand on the desk, wrapping his other arm around me and leaning in until my spine arched.
I began undoing the buttons of his tunic, desperate to feel his skin. Kallen made a noise of animal want, then released me only to start gathering my skirts up, tugging the fabric past my knees. The ball gown bunched between us, and he slid his hands under the satin to grip my bare thighs.
“The things I’ve dreamed of doing with you,” he said. “The things I’ve dreamed of doing to you. You can’t imagine.”
I’d gotten two of his buttons undone, but it was hard to focus when his hands were gliding up my legs. “Tell me,” I said, starting on the third.
“I’ve imagined taking you in shadowed alcoves where anyone might stumble across us.
” He followed the words with the stroke of his lips beneath my ear.
“My hand on your mouth, keeping you quiet, because what I’m doing feels so good you can’t help but cry out.
I dream of your red-painted lips leaving streaks on my cock as you look up at me with those beautiful fucking eyes, and I dream of going to my knees for you multiple times a day, whenever and wherever I can catch you alone, because I don’t just want you, Kenna. I’m starving for you.”
“Oh!” I gasped as he sucked my neck. “Kallen—”
His fingers met the scalloped edge of my silk undergarments, and he dragged them down and flung them aside.
Then he threaded his left hand into my hair and slid his right hand up my leg until his thumb stroked the sensitive crease where my thigh met my body.
He bit down on my neck, a gentle sting of teeth.
“I’ve imagined helping you put on an outrageously complicated dress like this before a ball,” he said.
“Tightening each string myself, then ruining it because I can’t help but put my hands all over you.
Cutting it off you, then bending you over in front of a mirror so I can watch your face as I fill you.
And then dancing with you at the ball afterwards, knowing you’re still wet from me.
” His sigh ghosted over my pulse as he kept teasing me with his thumb, each sweeping touch coming closer to my core.
Then he drew back to look me in the eye again, his expression fervent with want.
“But that’s what I dream of most. Dancing with you, watching you smile, listening to you laugh, never letting you go.
Being with you—not just in the shadows but openly, in the light. ”
The words were breathtaking. To know he spent his free hours dreaming of more than just sex, that he dreamed of dancing with me and standing proudly by my side…
It filled a hollow place inside me, one that had been empty for a long time.
My whole life, maybe, because I’d learned early and often that there was little about me that might entice someone to stay.
Kallen didn’t think he was worthy of it, but he wanted to stay.
Like called to like, I thought, looking at his yearning expression. He’d been far lonelier than I had for far longer.