Chapter Eighteen
The Dragon
Now
She’s here. And it’s like I can breathe for the first time in days.
She shouldn’t be here. I ended this for a reason.
I ended it for her own good. That she doesn’t seem to recognize this angers me.
But she doesn’t know how vile I am. She doesn’t know how all I’ve wanted from the moment I met her was to trap her.
She doesn’t know the depths of my obsession.
I wanted to add her to the stores of treasure in the palace, and I was willing to shrink her, to reshape her into my image of the queen I wanted, to keep her.
I thought that I fell in love with her the first moment that I saw her. But I never really knew what love was until I was willing to let her go.
There is a saying, and I’ve read it before, but nothing made it feel real. If you love something, let it go. If it’s meant to be it will find its way back.
But she’s just stubborn. She’s stubborn, and she’s not allowing me to make the right decision for her.
Enraging girl.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m here for you, you idiot. You’ve done it again. You made choices for us without talking to me.”
“Because I had to,” I say. “Lilith, don’t you understand, if it wasn’t for me, you would be off living your life, with no regrets, and no sorrow whatsoever. I had to do what needed to be done to give that back to you.”
“You cannot make me fall out of love with you any more than you can take the sun out of the sky.”
“I will take the sun out of the sky. I’ll figure it out. I’ll do whatever I need to do.”
“Why?”
“Because I—”
“Why?” she says, moving nearer to me. “Is it because you feel guilty about what happened with Colette?”
“Yes,” I say, because I know that’s the right answer to give to make her leave.
This whole thing has been a study in living contradictions, in being torn apart. I’ve wanted to draw her close and push her away by turns so many times over these past months.
She has bewitched me, body and soul.
She is my secret garden.
She is my sparrow.
She looks at me, and I know she doesn’t believe me. “Why?” she asks again.
“You foolish girl. You deserve better than this. More than this. You deserve to live your life on your own terms. You certainly don’t deserve to be trapped with a man who doesn’t understand the first thing about love. You have all this time left ahead of you, and you deserve to live unencumbered.”
“Do I deserve to live without the love of my life?”
“You deserve a different love.”
“I don’t want it,” she says.
“You don’t know what you want.”
“You said once that I was very smart. Clever. Do you not believe that anymore?”
“Of course I do. But you are good with science—that doesn’t mean that you understand this. It doesn’t mean that this is the right thing.”
“I deserve to be part of the decision-making. You cannot save everyone. Even Colette, she made her choice, Lucian, and you have to accept it. Your parents made their choice, you have to accept it. You do not hold the world together, and you do not hold people to you, or apart from you. You did it. You gave me freedom, you gave me the means to live without you. And I’m choosing to live with you. ”
“You need to go to school.”
“I need to know that I have you. And whatever else I choose to do on top of that, that’s just the way that I choose to live life.
It’s different than choosing who I share my life with.
It’s different than choosing that fundamental piece of who I am.
I love you. That is essential to me. Nonnegotiable to me.
I’m your wife. I’m the Queen of Alabria.
You are my new dream. And I deserve the respect that I know myself well enough to know what I’m choosing. ”
“But it cannot possibly be me.”
I am broken. I am cold and difficult, I have never known connection to another person until her. And it feels too good to be true that I might have found it now.
That one day, my dream walked into my throne room, broke into my isolation.
That she found me.
How can this be?
It is beyond miraculous and it seems a foolish thing to believe—a fairy-tale thing.
She takes a step toward me, and another.
Until she has closed all the distance between us.
Until she stops and puts her hand on my face.
“Lucian, do you remember what I told you about my dreams? About the way that I was too afraid to have them? I think you’re afraid.
And I believe, I do believe that you want to do what’s best for me, but I believe that you are truly scared of you being my choice because it means you need to hope.
It means you need to love. And do it in a way that doesn’t allow you to have absolute control. ”
“But…”
And I break apart. Because I realize what she’s saying is true.
Because I fell in love with her from the moment she walked in.
And everything that I’ve tried to do since then has been about maintaining a level of control while allowing myself to have her, and when I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore, I let her go completely.
And all of this has been about keeping myself safe.
All of this has been about running from the pain in my life.
I have known loss. Endless, horrible loss. I’ve known the cruelty of humanity and so rarely have I known the joy in it.
The feelings I have for her are so intense I wanted to protect myself in any way I could.
But I don’t want to be safe.
I want her.
To be the hero of the story, you have to risk.
I will risk it all for her.
To be her hero.
“I love you,” I say. “It isn’t like anyone else.
This isn’t about guilt. You’re right. It’s about my fear.
And I despise my own fear. Because when I was a boy and they were torturing me, I felt too much of it.
I tasted too much of it. And now that I have the possibility of this happiness I find…
” I stand up, and I kneel before her. “I fell in love with you the moment you walked into this throne room.”
And with those words, I’m free.
As if they’re a magical spell that lifted a curse from me. One I’ve been living under for far too long.
“What?”
“It’s true,” I say. “I loved you from the first moment that I saw you. You are everything I never allowed myself to want.”
“That’s what you are for me, Lucian. You are absolutely everything to me. I had the epiphany that I could want any number of other things for a career, for a focus of study, but I could never want another person the way that I want you.”
“I have never had the option of choosing what I want to do with my life. But when you walked in it became clear. I want to love you. You are the fulfillment of every dream that I’ve ever had, of every story that I’ve ever read.
I always wanted to escape my life. I wanted to read about people who weren’t me.
I wanted to connect, and sometimes fictional people were the only way to do that.
Until you. You, and your resistance to reading good books.
You, somehow, were instantly and immediately this missing piece to myself.
Maybe because you are a scientist and I’m the furthest thing from it.
Maybe because you’re the first person to look at me and not be afraid of me. ”
“I’m more than not afraid of you,” she says. “I love you.”
I cannot remember the last time I heard the words, and she’s said them to me so many times. A gift beyond anything that I’ve ever known.
“I love you,” I say, holding her precious face. “I love you. I love you.”
I realize that I’ve looked at everything the wrong way. It’s been about what I allow. What I can bear. About what cage I put her in or release her from. All about changing her to suit me. When maybe we need to change together.
“The cage is open, sparrow,” I say. “Let’s fly together.”