KISS IT BETTER
Esme awoke to a head lying on her chest and pissy voices from her living room. Briefly, she thought she was waking at her own funeral. But no. There wasn’t nearly enough wailing.
“You don’t think what she did was a problem?” Urias said from a room away. Esme kept her eyes closed, her first instinct to eavesdrop.
“She’s Esme. If she wasn’t dramatic, she wouldn’t be her,” Tagas said, his voice so smarmy she could hear his smile.
“She’s rigging this competition.”
“Perhaps you should take a note from the rest of us and let her.” Samander spoke this time, sounding more exhausted than Esme had ever heard him.
“Look, Ryukyhn, we love you dearly, but your infatuation with that man is no reason to hand him a kingdom. You don’t have to identify with every half-dead, pathetic creature you find in a ditch.
” He sighed like what he would say next would hurt. “I know you miss Esme and Mak’kon—”
“This has nothing to do with them,” Urias rushed out.
“It’s no crime to miss your past loves. You were together for a long time,” Samander continued slowly, carefully.
“That’s not—”
“But latching on to Janos just because he makes you feel needed isn’t the answer,” Samander finally finished.
“He’s sad and alone and I bet when you’re together it feels like you’re the sun and the planet each, orbiting and being orbited by each other’s attention.
Like only the two of you exist. You can orbit each other—I won’t judge you for being in love—but Esme is doing what is best for this country.
Balthazar is no gentle redeemer, but he sure isn’t Janos Rivel. ”
Urias was silent. Esme’s chest ached. When Mak’kon had left Esme and Urias for Isobel, they hadn’t lasted long.
They’d tried, but beds always felt too big, living rooms too dead, hugs too hollow.
So, Esme and Urias had agreed to put their relationship to rest. That was a decade and a half ago.
Esme had moved on to Mina, Mak’kon continued on with Isobel, but Urias…
he’d never found another. If there was one thing Esme knew about him, it what that he craved forever.
When it had been her, Urias, and Mak’kon, they’d planned on spending eons together.
Urias had a forever, and then, in a matter of weeks, it was gone.
“He’s not who you think he is,” Urias rasped, then Esme heard a bottle uncork. She smelled the alcohol from the bedroom.
Daphna sighed. “Then tell us who you think he is. Tell us what he’s done to have you so blind to sense that you will prop up a murderer of thousands.”
“He’s trying to be better. Just being here, away from his father, he is better,” Urias said. Someone groaned, and Esme agreed. “He’s never had a chance to until now, but he wants to change. We’ve all done it. Why can’t he?”
“Yes, we’ve changed. Over the course of decades, not a few weeks of competition.”
“Weeks of Esme trying to murder him, you mean.”
“Well, if he deserves to be murdered—”
“You slit your throat in a public arena and the first thing you do upon waking is eavesdrop on your friends?” This voice was right by Esme’s ear. Warm and joking and—
And Mina.
Esme’s eyes flew open. Her memories slammed back into her full force as she bolted up in bed and grabbed her wife. She was clean now, in one of Esme’s house dresses. Her hair had been combed, her wrists wrapped in bandages.
She was safe.
And still, all Esme could see was that platform collapsing under her.
Esme grabbed Mina by the middle and pushed into her chest. She grasped around her back, her sides, her hips, checking for every handful of softness, fearful that starvation might have taken them.
She pushed her hands into her hair to see if her head was bleeding, even tried to pull her lip down and count her teeth, just in case.
“My love, I am fine!” Mina said tightly, wheezing against Esme’s brutal grip. When she saw that Esme refused to believe that, she held her by the shoulders and forced Esme’s eyes to meet hers. “I said I’m fine.”
“You were just weeping on a rickety slat of wood over a pit of eels.”
“Yes. And now I am sitting warm in my wife’s bed, having just eaten two bowls of eel soup.
” Mina leaned down and brushed her nose against Esme’s.
“I will admit, my stomach is full of ice and acid, and my hands still shake, but you are next to me, and Gia is safe with Isla, and I am clean and fed. As long as I can remind myself of those things, I will be okay.”
Esme’s lips wobbled. Did Mina not understand that that wasn’t enough?
Surely not, because she leaned down and kissed the corner of Esme’s mouth, then her lips, then the other corner.
“How did Isobel even find you?” Esme asked.
“I’ve no clue. They snatched me from the kitchens last night.
I don’t think the guards understood why, so they just kept me in one of the cells downstairs while they played cards.
In the morning, the smeared dirt all over me, put a bag over my head, and hauled me out.
” Mina twisted her lips. She’d given a sanitized version of events, but there was nothing quick or clean about being dragged from your work and thrown into a dungeon by a legion of unknown men, only to be gagged and cuffed and propped up on a death trap.
But that was Mina. She always glazed over the worst parts.
Over Esme’s worst parts, over the dangers of being hers.
All so Esme wouldn’t feel guilty about the mess she’d brought her.
But after today, there was no escaping that guilt.
“I can hear you catastrophizing,” Mina said, propping herself up on one hand as Esme sank into the bed. She tried, over and over, to formulate exactly what she’d have to say. She didn’t know how to tell Mina that this was, indeed, a catastrophe.
Esme hooked a tendril of Mina’s hair behind her ear. “I did this. It’s all my fault,” she said.
“How?” Mina climbed over Esme’s lap and leaned over her. “Did you send the men to kidnap me? Did you design the trial?”
“Isobel only targeted you because of me. If I’d never—” If she’d never tried to scratch out a future for herself in this mess…
But she had. She’d tried and she’d succeeded.
Esme could hope because she’d earned it in blood.
There would be more to bleed for. Up against Isobel, Esme would have to drain herself dry.
But only she should have to bleed.
“Isobel’s evil is her own,” Mina said.
“And my evils are my own,” Esme said, trying to put steel into her voice.
Isobel wanted all-out war. Esme would happily draw her sword, but not with Mina close enough to be a casualty.
“And I will do more of them. But they aren’t for you to suffer.
I’m sorry you were dragged into this. You deserve a nice, quiet life with a nice, quiet wife. You deserve—”
Mina grabbed Esme’s jaw and held it shut. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”
“—for your life to not be in danger because of the person you love,” Esme finished anyway. Her voice was uneven and cracking and she felt like her whole body was breaking. The prospect of separating from Mina, as necessary as it was, hurt more than slitting her own throat.
Mina ground her jaw, her hand still clutching Esme’s face, then lowered herself nose to nose with her wife—but not for a kiss.
“I am always going to be in danger because of who I love,” Mina’s voice was sharp.
“What would happen if I settled down with some nice lady and we had a tiny house out in the countryside? Some goat-fucking farmer would still come at us with pitchforks. My life was never going to be easy, Esme. When I fell in love with you, I knew that. And I chose to love you anyway. I chose to accept you showing up at my door covered in blood. I chose to accept you disappearing for months on end. I chose to accept that sometimes you were going to have to be evil.” Mina shuddered, her stare digging into Esme like a fist to her gut.
“I was married off at fifteen, and Gia was an accident, and I was forced to leave the only home I’d ever known with a toddler when my husband died,” she continued.
“All my life, this world has yanked me around. But I am done with that. I choose what I can handle, what I deserve, and I choose who I love. You don’t get to make some grand decision that I’m too good for my own choices.
So no, I will not slink off and let you martyr yourself out of spite for Isobel.
I will not sit at home and weep for you because I don’t know what you’re doing, or where you are.
And I will not shy away from a little bit of fucking evil. I choose your evil.”
Esme’s breaths rushed out. Tears gathered in Mina’s eyes, but they were not tears of sadness. Part of Esme wanted to fight her, to tell her this was a terrible decision, but another part knew that telling Mina what to do was a waste of her immortal breath.
The same way Mina chose Esme’s evil, Esme would have to choose her love just the way it came. Mina Rahl had never run from anything. What was a few minutes on a rickety platform to a woman who’d stared down a country’s laws and spat on their shoes her whole life?
Mina was strong. Stronger than Esme gave her credit for.
Esme grinned at the anger bearing down at her. What a way to be loved.
She rushed up to kiss her wife. Mina’s anger singed her lips, but Ojalla on fire, was it good to burn.
Mina forced Esme so deep into her pillows that the cotton stuffed up her ears.
Esme’s senses screwed down tight. She couldn’t smell past the hints of lavender and sage on Mina’s skin.
She couldn’t hear around the thumping of Mina’s heart, or the soft moans she pulled deep from Esme’s chest. She couldn’t feel a single place on her body not burning against her wife’s scorching skin.