Chapter 100
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED
B ased on the pattern of my wife’s moods, most notably the nights she had come to my room in Lochlann, I estimated that she would come bursting through my door just shortly after midnight.
So I worked until late into the night, stopping just before the twelfth hour to send for chilled glasses for vodka. Then I braced for a battle that was entirely different from the kind I had been fighting lately, even as the stakes felt nearly as high, and the odds of victory every bit as slim.
I didn’t have to wait long for her to push open my door. There were no passageways here, but her entry was otherwise the same as it had been at Chridhe.
“Lemmikki,” I greeted her from the armchair near the fire. “I wasn’t expecting you to come barreling in here tonight.”
I waved toward her waiting drink in case the sarcasm in my voice hadn’t been evident, an intentional reminder that I knew who she was. She froze in the doorway, muscles tensing like she might turn back around. Then she stalked forward, all but slamming the door behind her before she yanked her vodka off the table and downed half the glass.
We sat in silence while I steeled myself for the volley of arrows she was no doubt preparing to rain down on me, each one burning with the fuel of her pent-up resentment.
She eyed me for a long moment over her cup, like she wasn’t sure where to start. When she did speak, even she looked vaguely surprised by her words.
“You said you wanted to share your life with me.” Her tone implied that the words had been a lie, the first in a long line of betrayals as she saw them, rather than the deepest truth I had ever given anyone.
“Yes, Lemmikki.” My eyes bored into hers, willing her to see the unvarnished honesty of those words. “My life . Not my death.”
She huffed out a breath, shaking her head. “You don’t just get to pick the parts you want, Evander. Either you’re all in, or you aren’t.”
How very like her to see the black-and-white of this without the important distinction of her storms-damned life as the consequence of choosing wrong.
“I will never be all in if it means you needlessly dying,” I pointed out the obvious, since she seemed to be deliberately ignoring it.
“Fine.” The clipped word was less of a concession than a temporary avoidance. “If you were so worried about that, why didn’t we both go to Lochlann?”
I blinked. Why hadn’t I abandoned all of my responsibilities and the people who were mine to protect, the men who were dying for me, the clan that was both my right and my obligation by birth?
“I had a clan to protect,” I said simply, stating what should have been obvious.
Her lips parted as she reared back in her chair. “Whereas I just had my next tiara to pick out?”
Whereas up until you had claimed your share of Besklanovvy, you had never once referred to these people as yours. You don’t even like Socair. There was no need for you to give your life on behalf of people who hated you just because you made the choice to marry me.
She knew that as well as I did.
“It’s different, and you know it,” I said.
“I don’t, actually,” she shot back, eyes narrowed and chin raised high, ready to fight. “Explain it to me.”
I searched for a way to put it into words, settling on the simplest explanation.
“The difference is that I swore an oath to protect my people, and you didn’t.”
The difference is that I had no discernible way out and you did.
She pursed her lips, acceptance and annoyance warring on her features. “And what about the promise you made to me? That we were in this together? Or did you conveniently forget about that oath?”
No, I hadn’t forgotten, but there were other oaths that had superseded that one. The promise I had whispered to her in the middle of the night was not equal to the vow I had made her twice over, something I reminded her of.
“I also made a vow to protect you.” Twice, Lemmikki.
She shot forward in her chair, grasping her glass in a white-knuckled grip. “We made a vow to protect each other!” Her voice rose with every syllable. “But you didn’t even give me the option of fulfilling mine when you left me in the middle of the night with a stars-damned note!”
She wasn’t wrong on that front. All of the choices had been impossible, and only one had kept her alive.
But I wasn’t an idiot. I had known that it would hurt her, and seeing that pain written plainly on her features was like a kick to the gut.
My frustration with her anger gave way to the same clawing guilt I had felt walking away from her that morning. Even then, I had known she deserved more of an explanation than I could give her, but I hadn’t trusted myself to do what needed to be done.
At least I could explain that to her now.
“I knew that if I told you, you would try to talk me out of it, and because it was already destroying me to leave you,” I emphasized, trying to make her understand that the choice had not been an easy one, “I would cave. Then you would die.” Or at least, she would have, were it not for the makeshift soldiers she scrounged up at the eleventh hour. I acknowledged as much. “The Besklanovvy never occurred to me, and I didn’t see another way to keep you safe.”
She met my eyes for a long moment, so many things churning in her pale-green gaze that I couldn’t begin to decipher them all.
“And what if there hadn’t been?” Her voice was quieter now, each word falling like a corpse hitting the ground, like the moment you reach out your arms for your fallen comrade only to see there’s nothing left to save. “If I hadn’t been able to get the Unclanned? What if you had died, and I hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye?”
Her voice broke on the last word, and it fractured something inside of me knowing I still couldn’t give her the answer she wanted.
My voice was softer when I spoke, a quiet plea for her to understand. “Then I would have been grateful I did everything I could to keep you from that same fate.”
She looked away, shaking her head in resignation, like she already felt the same impending chasm that I did yawning between us and filled with all the shades of crimson and gray that painted the landscape of our lives.
“You know what kills me, Evander?” she said quietly, her eyes meeting mine again, shining with the tears she refused to shed. “That you knew—you knew that losing you was my worst fear. I told you I didn’t want to live in a world where you weren’t. And still, somehow you see no problem with the fact that you resigned me to that life without a second thought.”
Is that what she believed? That I had left her in that inn because it was the first merry plan I had come up with? Did she truly not understand what that morning had cost me?
“It wasn’t without a second thought.” My tone was low, but every bit of my conviction bled through. I leaned forward in my chair, speaking more forcefully as I said, “It was the only way. I couldn’t have handled it if something happened to you.”
That was clearly not the answer she had been looking for, based on the way her nostrils flared with indignation.
“Do you even hear how selfish that sounds?” She bit out each word. “What about what I could handle? Do you honestly think there is any part of me that would want to go on living if you were gone?”
I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the contradictory combination of frustration and remorse that flooded my veins.
Yes, I knew it was selfish. The difference was that if something happened to me, she would have reasons to keep living. She had her entire family to support and adore her, and she would move forward one day, even if it didn’t feel that way to her now.
Whereas I was liable to turn into my father without her, a fate I fervently believed was worse than death.
Opening my eyes, I gave her the only apology I could.
“I never wanted to hurt you.” It destroys everything inside me to see you in pain, lemmikki, to know that I caused it . “And I am sorry for that.”
She let out a slow sigh. “I don’t want an apology, Evander. I want you to say that you’ll never do it again.”
Of course she did. How very like her to ask for the single thing I was willing to deny her.
I was tempted—so tempted—to give her the words she wanted to hear. To let us both live in the lie and hope that we never had the circumstances to put it to the test.
But that was not our lives. We had not yet escaped this war, and I could not pretend that if I had the same set of circumstances, the same threats to my wife, the same impossible chance at keeping her safe from them, that I would not make the same decision every time.
Whether her life was pitted against my clan or my life or my soul, my choice was, and always would be, the same.
Always her.
“Lemmikki, I would do anything for you. Give anything for you.” My clan, my life. And this time, my soul. “But you cannot ask me to sit back and watch you die when there is something I can do to stop it. I am not capable of that.”
“Even if that’s my choice?” The words were desperate, dripping with the last vestige of hope that we would walk away from this without adding to the scars we were still carving into one another’s flesh.
Like she was holding her breath before the battle horn sounded and begging me to make my retreat before we were engaged in an all-out war.
But I knew my answer now, just as I had known it then.
Her choice or her life? Her life still won, every time.
I let my truth slice through the air like a dagger, shattering the fragile possibility of a truce. “Even then.”
Shaking her head, she stood. I wasn’t surprised when she walked away, even as my mind refused to process what it might mean for the future I was supposed to have with her. Would she really leave because I couldn’t convince myself to hand her over on a platter to Iiro’s cruel whims?
If the idea of her living out her life in Lochlann had been unthinkable before we were married, it was unbearable now. Could I live with her choice if it was the price of keeping her safe?
And would any of it even matter when we were forced to return to the reality of war?
I didn’t have any answers, but the questions plagued me for the rest of the night.