Chapter 64
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
R owan was pacing the room when I opened the door, though her motions weren’t quite as furious as I had expected them to be. Frustration still brimmed behind her bright-green gaze, but it was tempered with a thoughtfulness that gave me pause.
She looked up when I entered, studying everything from my guarded expression to the way I remained standing in the doorway.
Though I had returned with the intention of a conversation, I realized I had no idea where to begin. Perhaps she felt the same strain, the same sense of unfamiliar terrain when it came to all the uncharted places in a relationship that had been hastily sketched from a series of murmured confessions without any of the roads to connect us along the way.
She sighed after a beat, making her way to the bar, which was certainly a fair place to start. I closed the door behind me while she pulled two crystal liqueur glasses down from the shelf, filling them both with a healthy serving of vodka.
Though I closed the small amount of distance between us, she didn’t turn or acknowledge my presence until she was finished putting the bottle away. Then she reluctantly met my eyes, though she was still silent as she held one of the glasses out to me.
My gaze lingered on the glass, wondering if she meant it as a peace offering or if she was hoping to curb my own temper before she unleashed her own once more. Her features were controlled, though, and the day had certainly called for a drink, so I took the proffered glass.
Her fingers were warm against mine, just as they always were. The energy hummed between us and she swallowed. I was almost tempted to revert to our earlier solution, but there was no need to bury yet another body when we were already swimming in the corpses of all the things we never quite acknowledged.
Even now.
This, at least, was a problem we could solve.
I gestured to the small seating area in our main room, a silent invitation for us to sit before we began our conversation.
Rowan took a seat on one of the oversized armchairs made from leather of the deepest black.
Her fair skin and scarlet curls stood out in stark contrast to the leather. Even her size was too small for the chair, like it was made for anyone else in the world but her. And of course, it had been.
Or at least, it had been made for anyone who wasn’t my tiny, feral Lochlannian wife.
I sighed, taking another sip from my glass, still at a loss for where to begin. I wasn’t precisely sorry, and I wouldn’t insult her with an apology we both knew wasn’t sincere.
Neither had I missed the point of all the things my cousin had said.
While I was still debating how to move forward, Rowan surprised me by speaking up first.
“I can acknowledge that I was, perhaps, not entirely in the right for speaking up in the council room today.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, each word of her almost-admission pulled reluctantly from her lips.
Still, my eyebrows climbed upward. I had been half bracing myself for more hurled accusations of sadism.
“You understand that it’s not that I want you to be silenced,” I responded, wanting—no, needing —her to see the truth of that. I hadn’t fallen in love with a demure woman, and I certainly didn’t expect for her to become one now. To show some restraint, yes. But not to disappear into the shadows, or to lose that fire I had come to love in her.
“Yes and no,” she began.
My lips parted, a migraine forming in the center of my skull. When I began to argue, however, she held up a hand to silence me.
“I do understand that your authority here is…” she continued, her pupils dilating on the word authority , the delicate skin on her cheeks flushing that same rosy shade she got whenever she wanted to test the limits of my stamina.
“Necessary,” she continued after clearing her throat. “And hard-won.”
Some of the tension in my shoulders began to ease at her understanding, but of course, she wasn’t finished.
“On the other hand... When I was going to marry Theo, I had resigned myself to a life of having no voice. I didn’t expect that here.”
My hand clenched around my glass at the idea that my slow, careful maneuvering was tantamount to the way he would have obliviously forged ahead into a lifetime of silencing her while thinking her private sparring sessions were a favor to her. She couldn’t have thought he would have brought her to the Council of Lords, probably ever.
I was trying to create a space for her, but she needed to understand that there was a difference in having a seat at the table, having a voice and wielding it like a finely honed weapon, and barreling into a room with less than half the information you needed and none of the tact.
I ran a hand through my hair, trying to filter those thoughts into something that was conducive to this conversation rather than provoking her again.
Though her comment rankled me, I forced myself to remember who she was. Outspoken, yes, but also impatient. In Lochlann, anyone in the general vicinity of the council room had the right to an opinion about its proceedings.
Here, your right to speak was earned. Even grown heirs didn’t speak at Summits most of the time, and the lords wouldn’t have dreamed of talking at a Council before they had sat through at least a year’s worth.
She didn’t know that, though, not that she had tried to learn. But pointing that out wouldn’t help matters, so I acquiesced—to a degree.
“I hear what you’re saying,” I finally acknowledged. “But have you considered that this has nothing to do with the fact that you’re a woman, and everything to do with the fact that you have exactly no experience with any of this?”
Her entire body stiffened. “Are you going to make another tiara comment now?”
Storms . So much for not provoking her.
“No. I...shouldn’t have said that,” I admitted. Though not untrue, I could see in hindsight that it had been unnecessary. “But I will say that I didn’t speak at my first council meeting. Storms, I didn’t speak at my first ten council meetings. I listened.”
Her jade eyes sparked with the return of her temper, and she sat forward in her seat.
“And that’s what I was doing, too, until—” She pinched her lips together, her fingers wrapped tightly around one of her curls. After taking a breath, she tried again. “You say you want to start as we plan to go on, then you’re upset because I dare to have an opinion.”
I let out a tense breath, exasperation lining my tone when I replied.
“It was not your having an opinion that was upsetting, Lemmikki. It was the manner in which you chose to express it.” That distinction was the crux of our entire argument, one I couldn’t seem to convey to her.
Sure enough, she shook her head.
“And if I had waited, your judgment would have already been passed. So my options are…” She arched her perfectly sculpted auburn eyebrows, her mouth parted as if this was the very point to which she had been trying to lead me.
Perhaps I had been wrong about the crux of our argument. Perhaps it was this, that when push came to shove, she saw no other options besides giving voice to her opinions or being silenced in it. There was no middle ground, no third potential option wherein she lent me a small fraction of the faith she felt in her own family to make decisions about her home kingdom.
She might have been able to speak at council meetings in Lochlann, but I had observed and heard enough in my time there to know that was not a right she exercised. So perhaps it came down to this, the part of her that always seemed poised to question my humanity, even now.
“Is it so difficult to fathom that while you are learning about Bear, in the meantime, you might simply…trust my judgment?” That you might trust that in spite of the harsher decisions I’ve been forced to make, I do act with my people’s best interest in mind?
That all the things I’ve done have been for a purpose, not to satisfy some monstrous need for cruelty?
That I will not follow in my father’s blood-soaked footsteps when I finally have the freedom to take his mantle as I will?
Rowan’s expression faltered, her eyes softening ever so slightly.
“I know that today, with the...flogging,” she began, stumbling over the word. “I realize that you were being lenient. So yes, I should have trusted you.”
I waited patiently, wondering if there was a caveat hidden in the silence between us. When she didn’t have one, I took a slow dreg from my glass, relishing the burn of the vodka as I contemplated exactly how delicately I wanted to proceed.
“And what if I hadn’t been?” I asked flatly, allowing the whiskey to embolden me.
It chipped away at a piece of my internal armor to be so direct with her, but her answer mattered. And I needed to know that my feral princess wasn’t going to regret her choice to come here whenever her personal bias came into play. When I inevitably was forced to make a decision that she deemed unsavory.
“If you hadn’t been right?” she clarified.
I shook my head, gripping my glass a little tighter. “If I hadn’t been lenient . That is not always a luxury I have, Lemmikki. In fact, it rarely is.”
Which, in retrospect, was why her reaction had bothered me so much more. The rare chance at mercy that still looked like savagery to her.
Rowan studied me, her wild curls falling over her shoulder. Her brow furrowed as her gaze slipped from mine to somewhere more distant as she considered how to respond, as I considered how much more her answer mattered to me than it should have.
She cleared her throat, meeting my eye once again.
“At the negotiations, I wasn’t going to make my counteroffer,” she said seemingly out of nowhere.
My mind raced back to those days, skipping carefully past the moment I found her entwined with Korhonan in his tent. My grip on my glass tightened again and I wondered briefly if this was it for the glass. If it would survive under the weight of my anger.
“What?” My tone was sharper than I meant it to be, but I didn’t understand what she was getting at. She had been so desperate to go back to Elk. To be his precious little wife.
“After I found out what Iiro had done, I was going to let the negotiations fizzle out, even though I knew it meant coming back to Bear,” she said, keeping her tone devoid of emotion. “Because...because I felt safest with you.”
My jaw dropped. I blinked away memories of Korhonan’s hands on her wrist, playing with that storms-damned bracelet, how quickly she had gone from enjoying herself at the cabin, playing at friendships with my men, to looking at me like I was her enemy as soon as he was in front of her again.
And yet…
“Then what changed your mind?” I asked.
“You said you were eager to get rid of me,” she said flatly.
Indeed. She must have forgotten what prompted that outburst from me.
“After you called me a child murderer,” I replied in the same arid tone.
A crimson blush crept up her neck and into her cheeks. She glanced away briefly, walking down that same unfortunate part of our memory lane.
“After you said your life would have been easier if I had never come here.” Her tone was softer then, as if this admission carried more weight than the others.
I considered her words, weighing them against her actions—the ones that took center-stage in my mind, and the ones I hadn’t allowed myself to consider for too long back then.
For all of her bluster about her love for Korhonan, was she truly telling me now that she was second-guessing herself? It had been clear that her attachment to him wasn’t the great love story she had pretended it was, but I struggled to make sense of the other side.
The part where she was admitting to wanting to stay with me. Claiming that, despite every part of her that should have wanted to run as far from me as she could, she wanted to stay in Bear.
Wanted to stay with me .
“If that’s true, why were you so upset when we returned?” I asked, still trying to make sense of the way she was steadily rewriting the history I thought I knew of us.
She scoffed, glaring at me as if I was being willfully obtuse.
“Because you said it was a punishment keeping me around,” she fired back. “And then I was here, where I knew you...didn’t want me.”
That had been the farthest thing from the truth. I shouldn’t have wanted her. Storms only knew it would have been better for just about everyone if I hadn’t.
“Anyway—” she continued, clearing the confession from her throat. “The point is that I do trust you. I always have. Today was just…”
“Not entirely your fault,” I cut her off, refusing to let her continue taking the blame for something that I should have taken more precautions against. “I should have prepared you better, especially for that.”
Surprise flashed in her eyes, and her posture eased incrementally.
“Well, in fairness,” she began, a small smirk tugging at the corners of her perfect lips. “You did expect me to have, what was it you said, basic common sense ?”
“Another error on my part,” I replied, not bothering to hide my amusement this time. “And Lemmikki?”
She looked at me expectantly, the sound of that word on my lips eliciting the same reaction it always did.
“Make no mistake about it, it was a punishment keeping you around.” She froze and I leaned forward in my chair, reaching up to tuck a curl behind her ear. “It was a punishment when I knew you could never really be mine.”
She swallowed, the movement tugging at her throat.
“Another error on your part,” she said softly, sitting forward so that her hips were on the edge of her chair.
My gaze drifted from her eyes, back down her neck to right where I had bitten her earlier, then lower, to the laces of her corset. More than anything I wanted to rip them apart with my teeth, slowly, methodically, until she was just as desperate for me as I was for her.
Unable to restrain myself any longer, I grabbed her hips and lifted her from her chair until she was straddling my waist.
A small exhale escaped her as she settled on top of me, the sound sending lightning through my veins. One by one, I pulled her laces free with my teeth, my lips, my tongue.
She raked her fingers through my hair, her breath hitching as each new inch of skin was exposed. She shifted in my lap, pressing against me a little more with each movement.
A growl escaped me when her body was completely exposed to me. I traced patterns with my tongue, marking her with my teeth, her breath hitching a little more with each one.
Finally, I skated my lips over her ample curves until I found her neck once again. I lingered over the red mark on her neck, tracing the outline with my tongue.
Mine . The word echoed in my mind as I paid careful attention to that particular spot. Rowan arched into me, her hands gripping my hair even tighter. A soft, expectant moan escaped her lips, and I couldn’t help but smirk against her skin.
She was mine—all the contradictory pieces of her—a fact I was going to remind her of for the rest of my storms-damned life.
I shifted my focus, skating my lips farther up her neck and gently scraping my teeth over her earlobe. My fingers dug into the curves of her hips as I lifted her with one arm, using the other to remove the damnable clothing that kept us separated.
A shudder ran through her. Every move I made, she pliantly followed, showing me with her body and her touch how much she was willing to trust me. Willing to let me lead her to the pleasure she knew I could bring her.
Grabbing hold of her mass of hair, I gently tugged it backward to expose more of her skin to my waiting mouth.
I took my time, savoring the taste of her until I was certain neither of us could wait any longer. Then, I pulled her closer, until her body was flush against mine and there was nothing more separating us.
Every part of her was perfect. Every sound. Every movement. Every exhale where she whispered my name like a prayer to some forgotten god.
And I accepted her offering. I craved it like a storm craves the sky.
Desperation fueled each of my movements, a hunger that only my lemmikki could satisfy.
After years of nothing but death and the looming shadow of my father’s madness haunting my every step, my every move, I thought that was all life had to offer me.
But now, I knew I could carve out an existence that included so much more. And I would be damned before I allowed anything to separate me from this one light I’d found in the darkness.