Chapter Ten #2
He rubs his chin, as if he’s seriously considering it.
“It suited me. I wanted to be frightening. I wanted to be someone who gave enough to the people that they would be happy, but also someone who would be seen as invulnerable.” He pauses for a long moment.
“Do you know, the worst thing about torture, it’s not the pain.
It’s the lack of control. I wanted to be strong.
I wanted to be strong enough that the videos they sent my family wouldn’t compel them to risk themselves.
I wanted to be strong. But I begged for my life.
” He takes a sharp breath. “I begged for my life. I cried when they burned me. When they cut me.”
I want to kill them all. A rage I’ve never felt before floods my veins. I wasn’t alive when this happened, I’ll never meet the men who did it, likely long dead, but I want to raise them from the grave to destroy them.
How could they do this to him?
Lucian.
“You were a boy,” I say, my heart feeling like it’s about to crack. “You were just a boy.”
“I was never really a boy. I was always meant to be a king. And when you are meant to be a king you have to be something different. You have to be something mythic. Something strong. I failed at that. It is my fault my parents are dead.”
“No, it isn’t,” I say. “Any parent would rescue their child. Any good parent. It doesn’t matter if you cried or not. Begged or not, they would’ve come for you.”
“Regardless, it has never been a desire of mine to be reduced to that state ever again. That lack of control. That sniveling… No. I have fashioned for myself a reputation for being strong. As for the planes? That’s how many of the rebels were sneaked into the country.
So many of them came from outside. And so, I have shut down flights to the country.
You have to come through the port. Because I… ”
It’s trauma. I can see it. But I know that he won’t characterize it that way. This iron fist that he’s cultivated is something that he needs to make himself feel safe.
To make the country feel safe.
But he was taken out of this palace as a young boy, and he has to continue to live here.
To rule here. The scars that came from what happened are on his skin.
Every day. A reminder of everything he’s been through.
Maybe they have gotten better over time.
Maybe it has gotten less painful. But it isn’t gone.
He would rather be the dragon than ever be that boy again. And I understand that. I also ache for him. Because he’s a man alone. A man kept so solitary. By his own rules and his position, by the pain that he’s experienced. By the walls that he’s built to protect himself.
But then he’s also…this. Whatever he is to me. I’m not sure why he’s so gentle with me, though even that is a bit of a contradiction. Because I’m his prisoner. But he’s given his prisoner an awful lot of blankets.
I’m his prisoner that he reads to.
That he kisses as if I am special. Yes, it would be easy for me to think of it as him using me. Using my body for his own pleasure, but he doesn’t. He shares pleasure with me. It doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t feel like I am an object. He makes me feel beautiful.
He makes me feel desired.
I want to ask him more. About his marriages.
About what actually happened. But I can feel the walls around him.
For a moment there, he opened the gate to me.
He let me ask questions, but I can feel that they will close the moment he feels like I’m pushing him too much.
I can’t take advantage and ask everything all at once.
“What a terrible thing to lose your parents,” I say. “My mother is one of the most important people in my life. If I would’ve lost her when I was twelve I think it would’ve changed me too.”
“What happened to your father?”
I shake my head. “I’ve never known him. One of the men that my mother fell in love with over the years.
But like most of them, he didn’t stay. She’s a romantic, though.
She always believes that this one will be the one.
I admire that in her. I know that some people resent their mothers for having a lot of relationships.
I don’t. She does a good job keeping it separate from her children.
She always did. But she hopes. Time and time again. I’ve never been like that.”
“And your sister?”
I shake my head. “Eve is a romantic. I told you, that’s why I’m here. She’s in love with Marcus, she wants to marry him. The idea of marrying you instead… It broke her.”
“What about you?” His eyes are fierce.
“I didn’t ever want to fall in love.” I look away from him. “So I figured I wasn’t going to lose anything by marrying a stranger.”
“You wanted to go to school.”
I nod. “Yes. But I weighed the consequences. I had some hope that perhaps I could still… But they were silly hopes. I made my decision.”
He makes that growling sound in his throat again. “Yes. You did. At twenty-two.”
“And you were king at thirteen.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Neither did I.”
“Meaning?”
I shake my head. “My sister’s unhappiness was unbearable to me. And as long as I could do something about it, I was going to.”
“Why?” He is completely baffled by this.
And I wish that I had a better way to articulate it to him.
Because I don’t feel like what I did was entirely selfless.
Particularly not now as I lie there with him.
But I don’t want to open up my chest and share the vulnerable feelings that have been growing inside of me for the past week.
I don’t want to start talking about things that I haven’t even begun to make sense of.
I do want to share with him—he’s done so with me, and generously.
But he is a man with twenty years more living than I’ve done. There are parts of myself that are unexplored. I thought it meant they didn’t matter. That they weren’t driving me. I think now that I’m wrong. I think there’s more to me, to the reason I did this than I can easily untangle.
“It was a chance to do something big,” I say.
“I’ve had plans all of my life, to do something to get out of the life that we have here.
Not that it’s a bad life. We aren’t destitute, even though we certainly don’t have anything extra.
But it isn’t enough to truly change anything.
To travel, to go to a university out of the country.
To…to dream. It’s a strange thing, because in some ways my mother and sister dream bigger than I ever have.
You can’t control someone else’s heart. The audacity to believe that you can love someone at the same time they love you, and that it will continue on forever…
That’s bravery. You can’t control that. You can’t plan for it.
I chose things that I could plan. But every year I fell short.
Every year I couldn’t quite get there because there was something else we needed money for.
And I know that you’re looking at me, and considering twenty-two very young, but for what I want to do time is passing me by. ”
I find a deeper part of myself, a deeper honesty than I’ve had before.
I wasn’t being entirely self-sacrificial.
I was stuck. I didn’t want to be. I have a sudden, clear insight into that.
“And part of me just thought…to hell with it. At least this is big. And who knows where it will take me. I know where all of my planning will take me. Up each and every slow, incremental step. But I was tired of taking steps. I wondered what it would be like if I could fly.”
It seems foolish now, because of course being a queen gives you power, resources, money, but it doesn’t give you a normal life. It has given me something different, but it is something with a lot more weight than I imagined. A testament, yet again, to the things that I failed to give importance to.
Certainly, somewhere in there, is the humanity of Lucian himself.
He was a symbol to me when I arrived. A legend. He is a man to me now, though I can’t say that means I have him figured out.
“And then I clipped your wings,” he says, looking at me with something like sorrow in those blue eyes.
“But your story makes me understand something,” I say. “Your wings are clipped too. You’re bound to this life. To all the things you have to do. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
I roll onto my back and stare up at the ceiling.
“My grandmother got abandoned by my grandfather. My mother was abandoned by my father. By Eve’s father.
I worry that Eve will also be abandoned.
All of these things made me afraid to dream in many ways.
Planning, yes. Dreaming, no. Maybe that’s why I’ve never liked fiction. Because it feels like a dream.”
He shifts, looms over me, brushes his knuckles against my cheek. “Will you dream of me, sparrow?”
What else is a caged sparrow with clipped wings to dream of? But I don’t ask him that.
Instead, I kiss him. I kiss him with every ounce of desire that is in me.
Not just the desire that I feel for him, but this reckless, endless desire that I have for my own life.
This need to soar. To succeed. To do something and be something.
This impossible paradox, that now I’ve become a queen, but won’t recognize my dreams. That now I am more important to the world in some ways, but my own life has become smaller and smaller.
Smaller.
But…
He lifts his head and looks at me, and I grip his face and kiss him, push him onto his back and climb over top of him.
I sit astride him, looking down at all his masculine glory.
As he allows me this power. As he allows me to assume this position, this role.
That’s what it will always be. What he allows.
Because he could push me off at any moment.
He could claim the dominant position. He is allowing me to feel powerful.
Can I accept that? Can I accept a life where everything is what he allows?
I don’t know what other option I have. Not now.
His hands span my waist; he moves them up my body, thumbs grazing over my nipples. For all that he has made my life smaller, he has made it so much bigger too, and that is another thing that’s hard for me to reconcile.
Without Lucian, I would never have felt my body like this. I would never have realized how much this part of me mattered. I had locked this part of myself away. I was so afraid.
I already want so much. I would never have been able to bear life if I wanted more. If I wanted a man to look at me and think that I was beautiful. If I wanted to be touched, kissed, held. If I wanted to be someone’s wife.
It was out of reach enough to want to make it to university. I could never have borne the weight of more dreams.
They are dreams. Whatever I’ve spent all these years telling myself. I’m a dreamer. I just didn’t want to be.
Suddenly, I’m overcome by the weight of those desires. Of everything that I want.
Everything that I can’t have. No one can have everything, I suppose. This man, this king, has been denied so many things. Tortured, isolated. How long has it been since someone has loved him?
The question terrifies me so I push it away. Shut it down deep. I don’t want the answer to that question. I don’t. I don’t want to be confronted by it.
I don’t want to have to think about it.
Thinking is the enemy right now. Why can’t I just keep on feeling?
God, but the feelings are overwhelming. They’re expanding in my chest, moving all through my body.
I want him. I maneuver my hips, arch them back so that I can take him inside me.
It’s not close enough. I want him, and it’s driving me.
Tearing me to pieces. I want more, and I don’t know what to call that.
I want more from everything. For myself, from him, from the world.
I feel like I’m being remade into something new, and it is painful. Unimaginable. And yet it’s also beautiful and wonderful and the most glorious thing I’ve ever experienced.
Lucian is unlike anyone I’ve ever known. Awakening things in me that are strange and wonderful and brilliant.
He has shown me the power in feeling.
But that is a double-edged sword. Like everything else with him.
I ride him until I cry out. Until he grips my hair and flips me over onto my back, drives us both into oblivion. Then kisses me like I’m made of glass.
He has taken things for me. He has given things to me. He has made my life smaller and larger.
And I’m left wondering what I’ve done to change his.