Chapter 32
QUINN
The crystal splintered with a scream. My head snapped toward the sound.
Mav stared as if I had driven a dagger into his chest and turned the hilt.
Shock and ruin warred in his eyes. Disbelief begged for a kinder truth, as though he were waiting to wake from a nightmare.
Mav’s grief and heartbreak flooded hot and merciless along the tether.
What have I done?
Did he…could he…?
Does Mav love me?
The thought knocked the remaining breath from my lungs. Had I laid waste to the possibility of real love with one uttered syllable? Panic stabbed through me. Guilt burned behind my eyes.
But how could I have believed it? How could Mav love me, a creature cursed and used, whose every bond had been a weapon in another man’s hands? Desire and tenderness were not the same as love. I had long since learned the peril of mistaking one for the other.
I had said yes to Edric because it was what I was taught to do—what every frightened instinct in me had learned to equate with survival. Better the devil I knew, better the chains I understood, than to hope for a freedom I could not trust to last.
Hope is a crueler prison than stone. I could not afford to be wrong about Mav. Not when the cost was a hundred years of sleep. The spell demanded love given freely and returned, a path that had never carved itself out in three centuries.
Edric offered a way out. He had explained that marrying would break both of our wretched curses.
After learning his parents had cursed both of us, I no longer carried resentment toward him.
I did not love Edric, but marrying him would give me a chance to live.
A loveless marriage was survivable. I did not have the strength to survive another century imprisoned in sleep.
I had not said yes to Edric. Not truly.
I had said yes to release. To relief.
However, the look on Mav’s face communicated that he saw no difference.
Those fierce, hazel eyes searched mine, pleading for something I did not have the ability to offer. In an instant, they changed. Warmth drained. His jaw locked. A shield fell between us. He rose so abruptly that his chair clattered to the floor.
“Excuse me,” he choked out the words.
“Mav,” I breathed, standing.
He gave me no quarter as he left the dining hall. With each step, the tether stretched tighter in my chest. The pain climbed until breath came thin, the thread of my soul unspooling after him, desperate to follow. I winced, teeth catching a sharp breath. Perhaps I deserved to be ripped apart.
“My bride,” Edric said, reaching for my hand. “What is it?”
Bride.
The word sounded wrong in his mouth.
“I must speak with Mav,” I said, drawing my hand from Edric’s.
Edric’s brows rose. “I’ll accompany you.”
“No.” The refusal leaped from my tongue. Offense flickered in Edric’s eyes, smoothed into civility. “I only meant this conversation must be private.”
It took everything to keep my voice even and my spine straight. I did not wait for the king’s permission to take my leave.
“The king will expect you—” a servant began.
“I shall return shortly.”
I refused to turn around and see the man to whom I had promised myself, knowing I had done so with my soul connected to someone else.
The tether served as my compass, dragging me toward Mav.
Each step grew more dire. Not merely the magical strain, but the devastation pouring through our connection. His devastation.
I must explain. I must mend what can be mended.
My heels rang against the marble. I could not move fast enough in these awful shoes.
I pulled them off, holding them in one hand and hoisting up the skirts of my gown with the other.
I ran to him. I did not know what I would say once I found him.
Only that if I did not try, I would never forgive myself.
Bolting through a door, I was spat into a garden courtyard tucked within the castle walls.
Mav paced near a stone fountain, jaw locked, hands locked tighter. The tether stormed, lightning seeking ground. He looked capable of combustion.
“Mav,” I called, breathless.
He turned to the sound. The sorrow upon his face carved me open. He was wounded, furious, and held together by threadbare restraint. The softness I had always found in his eyes had been scraped out.
“I don’t know what you could possibly have to say to me.” He did not raise his voice; nevertheless, the pain was palpable.
I stepped nearer, extending my hand to him.
“Don’t.” He flinched from my touch. “Please…don’t.”
My hand fell. My mouth opened and closed around nothing. I drew a breath as though it might carry what I needed.
“I did not mean to hurt you,” I said softly.
He let out a wry, disbelieving laugh. “Didn’t mean to?” His gaze cut to me. “Then maybe don’t accept proposals from tyrants with god complexes.”
“I did not accept him,” I said, moving closer. “I accepted a way out.”
He stilled.
The fountain’s murmur mocked us.
“I have spent three centuries in a gilded coffin,” I whispered. “Three hundred years of silence. Of stillness. Of sleep that never restores. And he—” my throat worked around the bile— “he offered an ending.”
“I damn well know what he offered.” Mav’s voice was quiet and sharp. “I was sitting right there.”
I moved closer to him, insisting he meet my gaze. “Do you believe I wish to be his bride?”
He said nothing.
“Do you believe I forgot the shape of sleep in your arms? Or think me insincere when I asked you to hold me? That all of the kisses I’ve laid upon you were without meaning?”
Something flashed across his face—doubt loosening, hope lifting—and then the mask slammed down once more.
“I think,” he said, “you didn’t trust me enough to ask if there was another way.”
A chill threaded my spine, for I could not refute him. In one desperate breath, I had made an irreversible choice without considering him.
“I was afraid,” I confessed.
“You didn’t have to choose him.”
“I did not choose him,” I insisted. “I chose to have a future.”
“You chose a future with him.” His voice snagged on emotion.
Silence reigned.
Finally, I asked, quieter than pride preferred, “Would it have changed anything?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Are you serious?”
“I am.” I swallowed the rawness. “If I had looked—if I had asked—would you have told me you loved me?”