Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
W hen I had been kneeling in a pool of Rowan’s blood and she was clutching my hand like it was the last thing tethering her to this world, it had been too easy to forget that we were no one to each other here.
That when her father came to take her from my arms, I would have no argument to make, no way to force myself into the room where her family stayed to see that she was well.
Instead, I was stuck in the hallway with Korhonan, like we were still equals in this ridiculous charade I had partaken in for reasons that felt tenuous right now. Because she hadn’t agreed to marry me any more than she had him.
The king came to question us, the murder on his features turning him into the monster my people believed he was for the first time since I had seen him standing in my courtyard in the dead of night.
Was this what he had looked like when he brought the mountain down?
It was almost comforting to see someone whose fury matched my own.
I hadn’t left her hallway for hours, not since her cousin miraculously healed a wound I thought might actually kill her.
Not that she was easy to kill. It wasn’t impossible, though.
Over and over, I replayed the moment when her eyes widened, her hand going to her abdomen. The moment my own heart stopped beating.
After an eternity, the queen stepped out of her rooms. She took a breath, looking between us with pursed lips before she addressed Korhonan.
“The princess would like to see you.”
His brow furrowed, like even he was surprised by that choice, and I fought to keep my own features neutral.
Twice now, I had watched the life bleed from Rowan’s features. The first time, I had wondered how much she resented that I was the only one around to pick up the pieces.
This time, she had all but asked me to stay. Had clung to my hand, breathed in my scent, matched my breaths with her own, all to ask for Korhonan the moment she was conscious again?
He slipped into Rowan’s rooms without a backward glance, but the queen visibly hesitated. A lifetime of Socairan politics must have failed me in that moment, because she scrutinized my features with far too much understanding.
I started to turn, though I wasn’t sure if it was only to pace along the hallway more or if I would finally be able to tear myself away from her now.
“Don’t go yet.” The queen’s words were rushed, more a caution than a command.
Did she mean not to go back to Socair? Not to leave the hallway?
Whichever it was, something in her tone rooted me to the spot. Hell, maybe I would have stayed anyway. Would I ever have been able to leave without seeing that whatever Gallagher had done was more than temporary?
Whatever else happened, I needed to know she was safe. I gave her a terse dip of my chin, and Queen Charlotte left after another uncertain sigh.
Then I waited, though I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for at this point.
Confirmation that she was well?
The announcement of her upcoming nuptials to Korhonan?
A moment that felt half as real as the blood seeping from the wound she suffered on behalf of me?
Korhonan didn’t stay for as long as I might have expected. He emerged with an unreadable expression, eyeing me for a long moment before he spoke.
“She will see you now,” he said quietly before turning to go.
I wanted to scoff at the imperious words, but my feet were already carrying me into her room.
The first thing I did when I came into the room was scan her for injuries. She was in a chair but sitting up. Her features lacked the pinched quality they had taken on for weeks after her flogging, so she wasn’t in any tremendous amount of pain.
“Lemmikki,” I greeted, my shoulders easing slightly as I closed the door behind me.
Rather than return my greeting like a normal person, she scrutinized me.
“You stepped between me and a sword today without even drawing your own,” she blurted out. “You could have died.”
Did she honestly doubt that I would do all that I could to protect her, even after everything?
“And you would have died if I hadn’t,” I reminded her.
Surely, she understood by now that was an unacceptable tradeoff for me.
“You asked me what I wanted to know, the other night,” she began, again not outright responding to me.
I didn’t have to think too hard about what she was referring to, the last time she had barged into my room unannounced. The sober time.
“When have I ever lied to you, Lemmikki?”
“When have you ever really told me the truth?”
“What is it you want to know?”
That conversation had been like most of our interactions since I arrived, full of unmet challenges and unsettled arguments.
“I did,” I confirmed, settling into the chair across from her to brace myself.
“Then I have a question.”
I said nothing, though I couldn’t help but be curious what she was finally willing to ask outright after the day we had had. Storms, after the week we had had.
She lifted her chin in a challenge, meeting my gaze solidly with her pale-green eyes.
“What does Lemmikki mean?” The words fell like hoofbeats on a silent winter night, unexpected and more obtrusive than they should be.
Of all the things I might have expected her to ask, that question had never crossed my mind. On its surface, it was a simple enough question, a translation she could have asked her spy-maid for.
But the stubborn set of her jaw told me she knew damned good and well what she was asking, and it had nothing to do with technicalities.
But why now? After months at my estate, where she never questioned the nickname. After a week of hanging off Korhonan’s arm—Korhonan, who she had wanted to see before me.
After she had nearly died today.
The first time I had spoken the word, I had told myself it was to stake a claim, to further piss Korhonan off. Though, even then it had rolled off my tongue a little too easily, an unreasonable feeling of rightness in every syllable.
Then the aalio had told her it meant pet , and it had suited my purposes to agree. As time passed, I could never quite bring myself to look her in her fierce, gorgeous, challenging stare and tell her I had been calling her darling from the moment she became mine.
Hadn’t I put enough of my pride on the line this week, playing her song and dance and competing with the man she had said more than once would be her choice in husband?
I swallowed, hearing her accusation echo in my mind even as I proved her right.
When have you ever really told me the truth?
When has any part of our relationship made that possible, Lemmikki?
“It, loosely translated, can mean pet , as Korhonan said at the Summit,” I finally said, not-so-subtly reminding her that I wasn’t the one who gave her that shoddy translation to begin with.
I expected her to drop the subject, as she usually would have, but instead, a fire burned in her eyes. She held my gaze in a clear challenge.
“And a better translation?” she demanded. “Tell me, Evander, what does it mean when you say it?”
My heartbeat stuttered in my chest, the way it did every time she said my name. I was still reeling from the sight of her bleeding body on the ground, the blinding panic that she could die.
She held me trapped in her verdant gaze, the invisible thread between us pulled taut to the point of breaking.
And for once, she wasn’t giving it a single inch of leeway.
I blinked, and I saw her hand clenched in my shirt, her tears in the kitchen, her resignation in the hall outside her door.
No one has hurt me since I left Bear.
The night in my rooms.
I was expecting you weeks ago.
Her shoulders were square and her jaw was set, but a storm raged in her eyes. Hadn’t I implied that I would tell her what she wanted to know if only she was brave enough to ask?
She had let Korhonan in first, but she was asking me to give up ground in this battlefield of ours, something that went against every instinct I had.
Of course, she was giving up ground as well, admitting that this mattered to her by pushing for the answer. Besides, sometimes you had to lose a battle to win a war. Was I really willing to walk away, to let her spend the rest of her life with storms-damned Korhonan rather than give her this one truth?
The air between us crackled with uncertainty. It felt like a turning point, this single word that had started out as a taunt and turned into so much more.
“It means…” I hesitated, the single act of surrender warring with everything I was. But then, hadn’t I always been willing to be something different for her? “Darling.”
The word hung in the air between us, churning in the currents of all the truths we left unsaid.
She inhaled sharply, her eyes going wide. She blinked once, then twice, her lips parting then closing once more.
In the weeks after her flogging, she was prone to bouts of silence, prolonged and intentional, like she couldn’t be bothered to speak. This was something else entirely, a speechlessness borne of disbelief, potent and expectant in the same stuttered breath.
For all that she had insisted on knowing, she didn’t seem to know what to do with the truth now that she had it. A thousand emotions flitted across her face, like she was reimagining our every interaction in the light of the information she had now.
I didn’t break her stare, unwilling or unable to look away.
Just as I was starting to wish I could pluck the words back out of the air, her features finally settled into an unmistakable mask of indignation. She shook her head, letting out a huff of air so furious I half expected it to be accompanied by actual flames.
“So let me get this straight. You take me. You call me your darling. You kiss me like I’m the other half of your soul ?—”
Part of me wanted to remind her exactly what that kiss had felt like to both of us, and the other part wanted to leave before she pushed us to a point we couldn’t come back from.
Then again, maybe we were already there, had been from the minute I walked into that ballroom.
I clenched my jaw, willing myself not to respond while she exhumed every body we had buried for reasons that made more sense at the time.
She ignored my warning look, barreling on. “—and say it can never happen again. Then you tell me we were only ever temporary, and send me away when I know, I know that you saw that I was willing to stay.”
I sucked in a breath, willing a bit of patience into my rapidly beating heart.
Yes, I had seen that. I had seen that she had wanted to stay with Korhonan, then me, anyone who felt the slightest bit familiar or safe in a world that wasn’t her own. I had seen the way she was terrified to leave my side after what happened with Ava.
But she hadn’t known what she wanted. I sure as hell wasn’t going to take the blame for ensuring she got home, where she was safe and had a relative degree of space to make a single storms-damned rational decision.
“And how would that have worked, Rowan?” I demanded, both clipped syllables of her name dripping with all the frustration I couldn’t quite quell at her stubborn refusal to see me as anything other than the villain in her narrative.
Like I had wanted to send her away. Like it hadn’t damn near killed me to watch her leave.
“You didn’t know what you wanted,” I reminded her. “You had been in love with Korhonan five minutes before that.”
And apparently five minutes after , I just barely stopped myself from adding.
She reared back, offended by the honesty she had insisted on only moments ago.
“I didn’t know what I wanted? What about what you want, Evander? Do you even want to marry me, or do you just want to make sure that no one else can have what you already think is yours?”
Both, Lemmikki. Always both.
“If I didn’t want to marry you, I wouldn’t have proposed.” I made sure she heard how very obvious that was, pretending for all the world as though this weren’t the first time I had admitted it to myself as well.
I had plenty of options available to stop her marriage to Korhonan, and she damned well knew. If I hadn’t wanted to marry her, I would have pushed her to choose Luca, or leveraged the trade I could get from Elk and Lochlann both for agreeing to her proposal.
I would have done anything besides risk my father’s wrath on all of my people, if I hadn’t had a visceral need to keep her for myself.
“Then why the hell did it take someone else getting there first?” She all but yelled. “When you left Bear, were you even planning on offering this betrothal?”
There was the barest raw edge to her tone that stopped me short, that made me want to give her any answer other than the truth. When I left Bear, I had been too furious to plan anything. I had only wanted to see for myself if it was true, if after everything, she wanted to be with Korhonan.
If she was safe, and happy.
No, I hadn’t planned on proposing, on bringing her back to Bear where she was neither of those things. Even now, I knew it was selfish.
“No,” I admitted.
Even knowing that whatever precipice we were dancing along was sure to crumble beneath our feet, I still wasn’t willing to lie to her about something this important.
She looked away, but not before I saw hurt flicker across her features. She took a deep breath, letting it out in a scoff. “Yet you have the nerve to accuse me of indecisiveness?”
My lips parted. Yes, I accused her of indecisiveness. Even now, she was upset I hadn’t raced here to marry her when she was already half betrothed to Korhonan. For that matter, she had thrown my proposal back in my face when I did make it.
Just like that, my guilt evaporated.
“Need I remind you, Lemmikki, that when I did propose, your first inclination was to say no? That you had to be forced into considering it at all?”
She scoffed.
“Need I remind you what that proposal sounded like?” Her voice deepened into what I could only presume was an imitation of me. “I own you, and even though I don’t want you, I don’t want anyone else to have you either, so I’ll make the sacrifice of marrying you for my people.”
I almost— almost smirked, but anger won out over my amusement. What had she expected? Poetry and cliche charms that represented everything she wasn’t? A declaration of love when she was hanging on another man’s arm and sleeping in his bed? She seemed to be continually forgetting that tiny detail, the way she had alternately thrown him in my face then acted like she had the right to be upset with anything I did or didn’t do.
“That does sound familiar,” I bit out sarcastically. “Not unlike when you burst into my rooms in the middle of the night in a fit of jealousy, then spent the entire council room meeting the next morning clinging to Korhonan like I was the villain in a children’s tale come to steal you away in the night.”
She leaned forward, her spring-green eyes never leaving mine. “What was I supposed to do when Theo was professing his love for me and offering me an alliance I needed while you were apparently sitting on your arse in Bear convincing yourself I didn’t know my own mind?”
My heartbeat thundered in my ears, veins pulsing with the force of my mounting frustration.
If by sitting on my arse , she meant, getting blood on my hands to pay the price for getting her to safety , then sure. And there had been no need to convince myself of anything when she had made it appallingly apparent just in the handful of days I had been here.
“You didn’t know your own mind!” I fought to control my temper, but it was slipping away from me in the light of her unending unreasonableness. “You were a prisoner for months. You went through hell, and you went from being surrounded by your family to only me. Of course you thought?—”
I cut off, unwilling to give her more than I already had. Besides, did I really know what she had thought? Hadn’t she believed she had feelings for Korhonan as well?
Perhaps she always latched on to the nearest source of Socairan man-comfort she could find.
“I thought what?” Her voice was simmering with a quiet rage, her hand waving sarcastically. “Go ahead, please, and tell me all of my feelings and how very unreasonable they were.”
“I don’t know what you thought,” I admitted, my voice calmer. “But I know that it would have been a mistake for you to stay, so if you’re expecting me to apologize for that, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”
Even now, I could picture it, the way she would have grown to resent me once the pass opened and she was free to come back here to live her easy, happy life rather than being stuck with my nightmare of a father and an entire clan of people who hated her.
She shook her head bitterly. “Don’t kid yourself, Evander. I would never expect you to apologize for anything, because then you might have to pull your head out of your arsehole and admit that you were wrong about it to begin with.”
Der’mo , this woman. She might have been the only person in the entire world who wasn’t afraid to talk to me that way, and I craved it like a dying plant craved the sun, even if it was infuriating.
I wasn’t wrong, though, and I wasn’t going to stand here and pretend that I had been so she could justify the choices she’d made. Like so many of our interactions lately, this argument was going nowhere. All at once I found myself ready to be done with whatever game she was playing.
“Was that what you needed to know, then, so you could finally make your decision after a week of stringing us both along?”
Was Korhonan already dancing in victory, prepared to embark upon their everlasting companionship borne of optimism and mutual obliviousness?
Of course not. He was too noble for that.
“I’m surprised it took you so long, when you’re so very honest with yourself and the people around you.”
Something flashed across her features too fast for me to read it. A strange sort of resignation, and something I was far less accustomed to seeing. Condescension. Like I was missing something obvious.
It was gone as quickly as it had come, though, replaced with her familiar glare as she got to her feet with surprising ease.
At least I had what I needed to know, also. She was safe. Healing. Feeling well enough to walk away.
“I had already made my decision when you came in. I just wanted to know where we stood, and now I do.”
She left before I could respond to that, which was just as well, because for a change, I had nothing at all to say to her.
It was probably better this way, anyway. Perhaps in a different life, where I had been granted the privilege of being soft and easy the way that Korhonan was, where my mother was alive and my father was sane, where Rowan and I had met under literally any other circumstances…perhaps then, we could have had something more than a room piled ceiling high with the things we couldn’t say to one another.
But this was not that life, and I was not that man.