Chapter 40
I just barely managed the composure to send Kirill and Taras back to the tent before I led Rowan as far out of earshot as we could manage and still be within the bounds of the camp. Then I rounded on her, heartbeat still thundering furiously in my ears.
“Is this what you meant when you asked me to trust your word? That you would sneak away like?—”
“Like a woman who was ripped away from her betrothed and hadn’t seen him in a month? What exactly did you think was going to happen when you put me in this situation?”
I had…no words. Like I was the reason she was in Socair or at that Summit.
And what did I think was going to happen? Perhaps I should have expected her to sneak away when I was in the middle of a good faith effort to trade her back, and to, once again, fail to remember that she was a literal prisoner, but somehow, she had managed to take me by surprise.
Storms forbid that some small part of her would remember that there was more at stake here than the romance she hadn’t given a damn about before the whole marry-him-or-die dilemma.
No, actually, I had plenty of words.
“The situation I put you in?” I fired back. “Don’t you mean the situation you put yourself in? Better yet, Princess, what about the situation you put me in? Don’t you think all of our lives would have been a lot easier if you had just stayed your reckless arse in Lochlann? Or kept your storms-blasted mouth shut at the Summit?”
She let out an indignant puff of air, cloudy in the frigid night air.
“The Summit where men were voting for me to die, you mean?”
“Only two men there were stupid enough to vote against you until you insisted on insulting them.”
“You were?—”
Not this again.
“ Never going to vote against you.” I interrupted her, pointing out what should have been obvious, what anyone else who was on trial for their lives would have bothered to pick up on. Even the ever unobservant princess probably would have taken note if she hadn’t been so convinced all along that I was the villain in her epic tale of forbidden romance and the many things that weren’t her fault.
I went on. “Which you would have known if you had been paying even half the attention you needed to. Who do you think was reminding them all of the cost of war against us? If you had kept your mouth shut, this all?—”
She spoke over me, stepping closer, close enough for me to feel the static in the furious air around her.
“Would you honestly have sat there and listened to them insult your whole?—”
“Yes!” I didn’t bother letting her finish, since the answer was obvious to everyone who wasn’t her. “If it meant keeping myself and the people I cared about safe, I absolutely would have sat there and listened to them insult myself and my family and my cat, for all I care. Even your precious Lord Theodore would have, and for once, it’s not because he’s a coward, but because we were raised to have a shred of self-discipline, something you could stand to learn.”
Tonight. In these negotiations. At literally any point she was in Socair.
She shook her head, her cheeks crimson with the weight of her ire.
“Theo really was right,” she shrieked. “You can never let anyone forget about their mistakes. Perhaps one day, we might all aspire to be as perfect as you are, kidnapping women who have done nothing to you and terrifying your own clansmen. Murder any children lately?”
I reared back, my lips parting.
It shouldn’t have bothered me, the accusation I faced down in one form or another every time I left my estate. And hell, even when I was there.
It was in the stares of the maids and the silence of the villagers; the round, terrified eyes of the ladies from neighboring clans who had heard nothing but horror stories about me. Somehow, it hit differently, coming from the only person who never seemed to be afraid of me, a reminder that I was a monster, even to her.
I had my question from the road answered. The privilege she had been born into would never allow her to understand the choices I had been forced to make, to see that more villagers had died as a result of her precious Clan Elk’s negligence than the ones I had to sacrifice in the precarious games I played with my father’s sanity.
I might have sacrificed my soul for the things I had done, but at least I could take responsibility at the end of the day, which was sure as hell more than I could say for the princess who still might start a war. Or did she think the innocent would be spared when her kingdom came for mine?
She opened her mouth like she might take it back, but we both knew where she stood by now. I didn’t want her half-arsed excuses made toward the end of getting back to her precious fiancé.
She didn’t have to worry about that anyway. To hell with her not belonging to him. I would do everything in my power to make sure I didn’t have to deal with her after this.
Finally, I found my voice.
“The only child I have ever had any desire to murder is you,” I assured her.
That didn’t stop their screams from haunting me, reminding me that they were more than collateral damage in a war I had been fighting since the day I picked up a sword. But I didn’t owe her that explanation, and it hardly mattered now. Not when I would finally be rid of her tomorrow.
I would make sure of it.