Chapter 47
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
T he silence that engulfed the room despite the raucous crowd we had left behind was evidence of the soundproof walls, which made sense for a wedding night suite.
At least the Lochlannian impropriety stopped at the doorway.
That wasn’t the only thing I gleaned from the sudden hush, though.
Rowan hadn’t said a word in nearly an hour, except for her brief exchange with Davin wherein I could assume she had responded to him. That wouldn’t have been noteworthy for a Socairan bride, but the idea that my lemmikki would let me speak for us both in her own kingdom was downright laughable.
Yet here we were.
She studied the room while I studied her, trying to determine if her reticence was from more than nerves. Her gaze followed a path of white rose petals to a cream-colored bed, the sheets already turned down, but her features revealed no trace of anxiety or anticipation.
And she refused to look in my direction.
She took a breath, stepping away from me to lower herself into a squat, plush armchair. Piece by piece, she began to free her carefully arranged curls from her tiara in a silence that was starting to feel louder than the shouts of advice had been.
I crossed the short distance, reaching out a hand to expedite this process, but she moved away from my touch.
“I’ve got it,” she snapped.
I froze, studying her once more. She had never been afraid of me, and she wasn’t now, either. Her posture was tense, her lips pursed.
She was angry. With me.
I mentally reviewed the evening, from the elation on her face down the aisle and the open desire during our dance to the stilted silence when we walked into this room, trying and failing to figure out how we had gotten here.
“Lemmikki?” It was a question and a demand.
If something was wrong, we could damned well talk about it like adults rather than spend our entire wedding night in this veritable tomb of silence.
She swallowed, but didn’t respond, finally wrestling the tiara free from her endless mass of curls and setting it on the table beside her. Her hair tumbled down her narrow shoulders, crimson tendrils that contrasted sharply with the pristine white lace of her gown.
She looked perfect. And like there was nowhere she wanted to be less.
I had made it clear that we didn’t have to consummate our marriage if she didn’t want to…and she had made it clear both in words and body language that she very much did want to. So this was about us.
I placed my hand under her chin, gently guiding it upwards until her tumultuous eyes met mine. She didn’t resist, which eased a small bit of the mounting pressure on my chest.
“Lemmikki.” I tried for a softer tone. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin. Preparing to lie.
I didn’t give her the opportunity, having no desire to run in circles with her tonight. Or ever.
“And don’t say nothing, because as I have said, you are a mediocre liar at best,” I reminded her.
She looked away, confirming that was exactly what she had planned on doing. A muscle ticked in my jaw, frustration and disappointment seeping their way slowly into my bones.
Then she let out her breath, meeting my eyes once more.
“What happens after this?” she asked.
My eyes went unbidden to the bed. Was she asking me about the mechanics of it all? Or what followed in the wake of our consummation? Was this about children?
“Not… that, ” she hastened to clarify. “After tonight.”
Well, I had assumed she was clarifying, but that wasn’t much more specific. I tried to answer her anyway.
“We return to Socair and have another wedding.” I slowly told her what she already knew.
She blinked irritably like I was the problem. “And then?”
After our second wedding? Was she asking me where we would live, when she had spent two weeks refusing to make that very decision? Or was she only irritated that so many guests had assumed it would be in Socair?
“Whatever you want to happen.” Again, I was telling her nothing she wasn’t already aware of.
Storms knew she had feelings about me making decisions for her, so surely that wasn’t what had upset her.
She averted her gaze once more, though this time there was more disappointment than chagrin. After a beat, she reached into the folds of her gown where a pocket must have been, retrieving a miniscule glass vial filled with a viscous, dark liquid.
Another stilted silence fell while she twirled the vial in between her fingers, staring at the swirling contents therein.
“Planning to poison me, Lemmikki?” I inquired with all the levity I didn’t feel.
There was nothing amusing about this moment for me. Whatever else we were, whatever plans we did or didn’t have, I had thought we would have at least this. This night. This wedding. This rare reprieve to pretend our lives were simpler than they were.
I still didn’t know what had happened to interfere with that.
“It’s to prevent...heirs,” she finally explained, looking back up at me with a thousand questions I couldn’t read brimming in her pale-green gaze. “You said you didn’t need them. Does that mean you don’t want them?”
I studied her expression, trying to figure out what exactly she wanted from me that she wasn’t getting. There were tonics in Socair to prevent children. It was a…controversial topic, to say the least, after the plague had made children so rare. But given the food shortages, no couple was forced to create another mouth to feed. Even among the aristocracy, large families had always been unusual, and it certainly wasn’t from chance.
Perhaps she was unaware of that, being that she had stayed so intentionally ignorant on so much of Socairan life, but surely she didn’t think I would try to push her in one direction or another regarding the vial.
“It means, as I said ,” I couldn’t help but emphasize, “that it makes no difference to me.”
If I had expected her to be appeased by that response, I would have been disappointed. Since she had already subverted all my expectations for the evening, though, I wasn’t particularly surprised when she let out an irritable huff of air.
“Of course it doesn’t.” Bitterness soaked her tone like snow melting into the earth.
As the intent behind her many questions finally became clear, I raised my eyebrows in a challenge, taking a breath for patience before I spoke. Not only had she been furious that I had dared make any choice on her behalf before, but she had pushed for the terms of the marriage contract we both signed to leave the decisions of her future kingdom of residence and the potential for heirs entirely with her.
“Am I to understand that you’re both upset with me for making decisions for you and upset with me when I don’t?” I spoke slowly in an effort not to snap at her.
A muscle tensed in her jaw, her expression going rigid.
“You’re right,” she said in a tone that very much implied otherwise. “I’m being ridiculous. You have made it amply apparent on now four separate occasions that it makes no difference to either you or the alliance whether I even stay in the same kingdom as you, so I suppose I’m the only one making an issue of it.”
I thought back to the occasions in question, notably the first one.
“Feel free to recall that you wouldn’t even consider my proposal before I made that offer.”
“Is that what you think?” She shook her head, dislodging several curls from where she had tucked them behind her ear.
Then she met my gaze with a challenge I knew all too well, jade eyes blazing into mine.
“Evander, if you had come into that council room and proposed a real marriage, there would have been no question. No debate. No talk of territories or trade or advantages.”
I froze, at a rare loss for words while the truths she had just hurled at me settled into place in my mind, subverting all the things I thought I knew.
“Instead,” she barreled on before I could latch on to a single coherent thought, “you waltzed in talking about ownership and benefits and how little you cared if I was around. So I got to spend a week agonizing over whether to choose the man who wanted to share a life with me, even if I could never truly return his feelings, or the one I loved with every last broken piece of my soul but refused to admit he wanted a real marriage with me.”
Her breath hitched in her throat, her next words barely audible when she spoke. “And I am sick to death of waiting for you to want things that you don’t.”
I inhaled sharply in surprise while words and phrases echoed in my head.
The one I loved with every last broken piece of my soul.
Waiting for you to want things you don’t.
It was rare—so, so rare that I had cause for regret. The life I had lived and the choices I had been forced to make did not leave room for second-guessing my decisions, not if I wanted to survive with a fraction of my soul intact.
Or survive at all, in some cases.
But remorse washed over me when pain pinched the corners of her eyes, because she earnestly believed that I didn’t care if she stayed here, didn’t care that the only thing I had allowed myself to want in this lifetime would be out of my grasp and out of my protection.
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it. Words had gotten us into this mess, and I wasn’t willing to carelessly fling more half-truths as kindling into the fire that was burning our tenuous relationship to the ground.
She spun around, pulling her hair over one shoulder and gesturing to the buttons on the back of her gown.
“Let’s just get this over with,” she rasped, her tone resigned to the point of emptiness. “I won’t lie to my people, and we don’t even have the option of lying to yours. If we’re giving them an alliance, we can at least give them a real one.”
Giving them an alliance. Like my marriage to her was a burnt offering for our kingdoms rather than the only thing in this world I would have—and had—risked my own clan for.
She truly had no idea.
All the games we had played, and I had so wrongly assumed that somewhere in the subtext she had seen the truth of what I was willing to sacrifice to be with her. But she didn’t understand that her absence was a sacrifice for me, one I would have made for her sake alone.
I stared at the endless row of pearls while I contemplated the meaning of the word broken, how it applied to me and to us, but never to the single boldest, bravest person that I knew.
Finally, I lifted my hands to her top button, determined that by the time I reached the bottom one, she would understand there was no part of me that wished to merely get this over with. Any of it.
My fingers skimmed along her bare skin, and energy surged from her body to mine. She sighed, the sound echoing in the ocean of silence that was drowning us both.
“You are not the broken one,” I began, unlooping the first pearl as I tried to piece together the things I needed her to understand. “And the life you would have in Bear, away from your family, sharing an estate with a woman who tried to kill you—and very nearly succeeded—dealing with Socairan prejudice and superstitions and politics, is a far cry from the one you have here.”
Here, where she was happy and surrounded by people who loved her. People she loved in return. The constant ridiculousness and chaos and noise of her kingdom, instead of a culture she found stifling with a man she hadn’t wanted to marry.
Except that, apparently, she had.
Her shoulders relaxed incrementally, and she leaned into me. Emboldened to go on, I unfastened another several buttons, revealing the creamy skin beneath, punctuated by the occasional lash mark. The twin scars to my own.
“I thought that by keeping my own desires to myself, I would allow you to make that decision unburdened.” I thought that if I told you how badly I wanted you to stay, you would grow to resent me for it, but tonight’s rare display of hurt was so much worse . “I see now, that was an oversight on my part.”
A miscalculation that had nearly lost me my lemmikki before I even had her.
One more button, then I had enough purchase to pull apart the two sides of the fabric.
“But as for what I want.” I leaned in, unable to resist the urge to taste the exposed skin, to try to infuse her body and soul with the conviction I struggled to put into words.
Then I took a breath, forcing myself to throw every weapon in my arsenal at her feet in a surrender that defied everything I had been raised to be.
“Yes,” I breathed. “I want to share my life with you.”
Need to, like I need the air I breathe.
“And yes, one day, I would like to grow our family.”
I don’t know anything about being a parent, Lemmikki, but I would learn for you. With you.
I moved faster with her buttons now, chasing the motion with my lips. Memories flitted through my head, all the things I had hardly allowed myself to think about, the days when I had lost myself a little more each day to her.
“What I want is to hear your voice every day, talking to my cat, teaching my soldiers inappropriate card games and tavern songs.” All the ridiculous pieces of you. “I want your cursed hair in my face and your clothes strewn messily on my bedroom floor.”
All the things that prove that you’re truly where I am, not just a ghost who taunts me with an empty mug of tea for the endless days after you’ve left.
Her breath caught on a sob. “You don’t want that.”
I considered the long-term reality of untidiness and conceded her point with a small smile.
“Maybe not that last one. But I would put up with it for you,” I added sincerely.
Another button came undone under the careful work of my hands, revealing her darkest scar yet. I leaned down, tracing the ropy scar with my tongue.
“I want to spend every night exploring each inch of your perfect body, and every morning waking up with you wrapped around me.” I murmured the words against her skin, relishing the gasp that escaped her.
But I wasn’t finished.
“Most of all, I want the chaos and laughter and life that you bring with you everywhere you go, and I want it always. I want you, always. As my wife, in every possible sense of the word.”
That was as clear as I could be. Now all I could hope was that it was enough.
At long last, I came to the final button. My heart beat faster in my chest as I stepped to the other side of her.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, but her lips were tilted up in relief. I brought my hands up to her face, brushing the tears away with the kind of tenderness I hadn’t believed I was capable of before she had sauntered into my life.
“And, Lemmikki?” I met her eyes while I offered up the final piece of myself, words I never believed I would say, let alone feel. The distinct, inevitable, unacknowledged truth responsible for rewriting the laws that governed every last piece of my being. “I love you with every last broken piece of my soul, too.”