Chapter 3 #2
The words were a promise and a wall. Cassie swallowed the confession and backed away on silent feet, the we and the I folding up inside her like paper.
Now, sitting in their quiet room, she pressed her palm to her belly. “I was coming to tell you,” she whispered, to no one, to him. “I was.”
The bond tugged again—a gentle hum that pressed at the edge of her mind.
She could feel him, faintly. The frustration, the exhaustion, the relentless need to control what couldn’t be contained.
Once, she would have reached for him through that thread of thought, the way she had in the beginning when every word between them had felt electric and new.
She remembered the first time he’d touched her mind.
His voice had filled her head, smooth and teasing, the memory echoing like it had been yesterday: “You are mine, Cassandra. Not because I demand it, but because the Creator made it so.” And her own shy, trembling response: “Then you’re mine, too.
” He’d laughed then, low and wicked, that sound that had melted her resistance and remade her world. “I was yours the moment you defied me.”
Her throat tightened at the memory. Back then, their bond had been effortless—fire and breath and laughter.
Now, when she brushed against his thoughts, all she felt was tension.
It made the ache sharper, the separation worse.
So she’d stopped trying. Stopped opening that door only to find the weight of his worry bleeding through it.
She turned toward the window, watching the forest sway beneath the moonlight. “What happened to us?” she murmured. “When did we stop being the easy part?”
A draft lifted the curtain; moonlight washed over the floor in a pale square.
The bond pulsed again, gentle but unanswered.
She didn’t want to be away from him—not for an hour, not for a night.
That was their gift and their curse—togetherness had remade her, and separation, when it wasn’t chosen, unmade her in small, mean ways.
She leaned her head against the cool window frame and let herself ache—for her parents, suddenly and fiercely; for the uncomplicated comfort of a kitchen light left on; for a mother’s hug; for a father’s terrible jokes. The wanting passed through her and left her quieter.
Across the room, on the low table, sat the carved wooden box she’d kept since the day she moved here, human things tucked away like talismans. A photograph. A letter. A small silver cross on a threadbare chain. She went to it now and lifted the lid. Her fingers found the cross and closed around it.
“God, give me sense,” she said under her breath. She’d never been one to pray and perhaps she should give it a try more often. At the moment it felt better than doing nothing. “And patience. And maybe a little help not strangling my mate.”
The prayer steadied her enough to breathe without hitching. She slid the chain over her head and let the cross rest warm against her skin.
The bond tugged once more. Not painful, just insistent, like a hand at the small of her back urging her to turn around, go back, try again.
She wanted to. Every part of her wanted to.
But the memory of his voice—I will not touch her—held her in place.
He hadn’t meant it in the way it sounded, not exactly.
He’d meant it as protection, as a vow. But, still it landed wrong when her news needed welcome, not walls.
She moved back to the bed and sat, drawing her knees up, the hem of his shirt brushing her thighs.
Her palm returned to her stomach before she could stop it.
“Hey, little one,” she murmured. “Your dad is . . . a lot. He loves hard. It’s messy and fierce and sometimes he misses what’s right in front of him.
But I’ve no doubt he will love you with the same ferociousness that he loves me.
We’ll tell him. I’ll tell him. When he can hear me. ”
Cassie wished she could say that she suddenly felt peace after working through her thoughts and feelings.
She wanted to be able to breathe without the ache in her chest from the hole that was left where Trik should be.
But that wasn’t how pain and sorrow worked.
They didn’t just magically disappear because they weren’t welcome.
She sighed as she tried to allow herself to be in the moment instead of fighting against it.
Duty knocked next, the unromantic kind. She had a meeting in the morning with the healers about supply routes, and another with the envoys who still flinched at standing in the same hall as dark elves. The realm needed a queen who could speak gently and stand up straight at the same time.
“I can do both,” she said to the room. “I can miss him and still lead. I can want and still wait.”
Her phone, sleek, stubbornly human, sat on the nightstand, a little defiance she refused to give up. She picked it up, thumb hovering over Trik’s name. She typed, deleted, typed again.
Still awake? She stared at the two words, then erased them. Too needy. Too teenage. She tried again.
Don’t forget to sleep.
She hit send before she could think herself out of it. The screen stayed stubbornly quiet. No dots. No reply.
“Fine,” she said, setting the phone down like it might bite. “Be king. I’ll be queen.”
She slid under the covers and turned onto her side to face the door. It was ridiculous, but she slept better like that—watching for the moment he’d finally give up being brave alone and come to bed. She promised herself she wouldn’t cry. She mostly kept it.
When sleep finally came, it came in pieces, images of trees and flickering light, the far-off echo of a song sung off-key. Somewhere beyond the walls, the forest turned in its sleep. Somewhere deeper, older, something answered the book’s call.
Cassie breathed through the ache and let the dark take her, one hand resting over the tiny miracle that would not be a secret for long.
She was not a girl anymore. She was a queen.
And tomorrow, she would act like one.