Chapter 8
Lucien
It feels like I’m stuck in some kind of bizarre nightmare that I can’t get out of.
After sleeping with Harper, I had so much I wanted to tell her, so many…
emotions. It was unexpected and overwhelming.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, but I knew that if I’d woken up next to her that morning I would’ve said all kinds of sappy things that might have gotten her to look at me the way she’s looking at the Hollowborn today.
My stomach twists, and I think I might be sick.
She left. I built up everything in my mind, everything I was going to say to her, everything I was going to apologize for, but then she arrived with the Hollowborn, and he had his arm around her like she belonged to him. Which, technically, she does. She’s his bride.
It doesn’t matter that she’ll be ours tomorrow.
I look at my brothers, hoping to see some sign of the direction we should go, but I see nothing. They’re hiding it well, but I’ve known them forever. They’re heartbroken. And they don’t have a clue how to handle this situation.
Heartbroken. The word echoes through me. I didn’t want the Hollowborn to be cruel to Harper, but there wasn’t a world where I imagined she’d… like him. A world where she’d seem closer to him than to us. A world where he would be vulnerable with her in a way we can’t.
That sick feeling churns up inside of me again, and I just open my mouth without thinking. “What the actual fuck?”
It wasn’t what I meant to say, but maybe it’s better than what would’ve tumbled out if I’d given it more time. Some pathetic pleading that she tells me she loves me and not him. Heat bites at the back of my eyes as I wait for her answer.
“What?” Harper asks, big hazel eyes staring up at me.
Her blonde hair has been tousled by the wind, by her ride with Ebron and the Hollowborn. Her cheeks are still flushed from the wind. She looks entirely like the Harper from my taunting dreams last night, and yet, everything is different.
I draw in a deep breath. “Tell us what the hell is going on with you and the Hollowborn.”
She doesn’t look surprised, just hesitant. “It’s complicated.”
“Harper,” Gareth says sharply, not wanting to be played with.
A fierce look comes over her face. “Fine. The truth is that from the moment Sevrin married me, he’s been nothing but kind and wonderful. He treats me… like a queen. Like I’m his queen. He’s gentle with me. He listens to me. And I feel… cared for by him.”
I turn away from her and drag my hands over my face, trying to gain control over my emotions, but it doesn’t work. Looking back at her, I say, “And what does that mean for us?”
She shrugs. Actually shrugs. “I don’t really know what you want from me. I know Sevrin wants me as his wife, his partner, his lover, and the mother of his children, but none of you have made it clear what your expectations are for this marriage.”
“Bullshit,” Alaric grumbles.
I realize my jaw is hanging open and close it. “That’s not what the savage actually wants. He’s just telling you what you want to hear.”
“Why?” she asks, cocking her head at me.
“Why?” I suddenly can’t think.
“Yeah, why would he lie about what he wants from me in a marriage?”
“Because he’s a Hollowborn!”
She looks at me like I’m stupid. “He’s more than that.”
“This is shit,” Gareth mutters.
“Sevrin has never lied to me or tried to deceive me. He’s been open and honest since our first encounter.”
“She says before she finds the knife in her back,” I say to my brothers, with a humorless laugh.
A warning flashes in her eyes, and her back stiffens. “You guys seem like you really want to focus on who Sevrin is, and what he wants with me, but you have nothing to say about what you want with me. Maybe you’re the ones I should be afraid of.”
“Us? You know us,” Alaric says, and even I can hear the heartbreak in his voice.
She studies him. “Do I?”
Of course she knows us. This is stupid. “The fucking Hollowborn has just put all kinds of ideas in your head, that’s what the problem is. It has nothing to do with us.”
She looks baffled. “How many ways do I have to phrase this? How many different ways do we need to approach this? What do you want with me?”
Gareth suddenly takes a step forward. “Wait. Last night we… we felt a lot. Was that Ebron? Or was that you and the Hollowborn?”
Her gaze finds a spot on the floor.
“Fuck!” I say, pacing away from her, a wild, reckless energy coursing through my body.
Gareth lunges for the door. Alaric steps in his way. They square off with each other, breathing hard, and Alaric says, “We might not agree with this peace treaty, but we can’t be the reason it fails.”
He’s right. Of course he’s right. But the clear picture emerges in my mind of us beating the Hollowborn to death, and it gives me so much satisfaction that I almost bolt for the door. But I still have too many questions. Harper’s more important right now than that fucker.
Turning back to Harper, I stare at her, my heart twisting. “With us… it was… was it like that with him?”
Her gaze finds mine. “It’s complicated.”
That’s a yes. And no yes has ever hurt as much as this one.
She brings her knees up to her chest, looking strangely vulnerable. Her ankle is still wrapped from the Hollowborn’s gentle care, and there’s sadness and confusion in her face.
Alaric very carefully crosses the room and sits down on the bed across from Harper. “Do you care about us?”
Her head jerks up. “Of course!”
It’s almost pathetic how relieved the three of us look.
It’s definitely pathetic how much weight her words take off from my chest. There’s, perhaps, a world where I can accept that she cares for the Hollowborn and us, but there’s no world that I can keep breathing in where she cares about him and not us.
Where we have to spend our days with her on our arm, while her heart is with him.
“It’s just,” she begins, then hesitates. “I trust Sevrin. I don’t trust any of you.”
The ripping sensation in my heart makes me curl over, my pulse racing. Her words echo through my mind. She doesn’t trust us. Of course she doesn’t trust us—we’ve never given her a reason to. Actually, we’ve given her a hell of a lot of reasons to show her why we can’t be trusted.
“I guess that’s it then,” Gareth says. “You’ve chosen him, and we, what, just have a marriage of convenience?”
“That seems like what she wants,” I respond, my tone tough, I hope, and not desperately sad.
But a woman who wants a marriage of convenience with us wouldn’t have fucked me. Wouldn’t have fucked me like that. Wouldn’t have changed my entire world with her touch. Right?
Alaric lifts a hand to tell us to be quiet, then looks back at Harper. “So, does that mean we have no chance with you? No chance of earning your heart?”
She looks confused. “Do you want my heart?”
“This isn’t going right,” Gareth says angrily, tugging at his hair.
“How can you even ask that?” I bite my cheek so hard I taste blood.
“I don’t know what you want!” she exclaims, a little anger in her voice.
Alaric reaches for her, but then drops his hand. “We want you.”
“How?” she asks.
“Every way,” he explains, frustrated.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she says.
“It means everything,” he says.
“We don’t want you with the Hollowborn,” I add.
“You made that perfectly clear.” There’s both an attitude and frustration in her voice. “But forget him for a minute. Talk about us.”
I scrub a hand down my face. “What do you want to hear? We want you. Period. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it. We want you.”
“And what does that look like?” It’s like she’s trying to torture us. Aren’t we saying all the right things? Aren’t we explaining ourselves properly?
Women always talk about wanting grand gestures, but they don’t know how to take it when you give them one. It’s pretty damn unrewarding.
But Alaric tries to give her more. Whatever the fuck she’s fishing for. “We want you to be our wife. We want you to be in our bed every night. We want you to care about us the way we care about you.”
“You care about me?”
“Fuck!” I shout. “Why are you making this so hard?”
“I’m not making anything hard!”
“You sure as hell are,” Gareth barks at her.
She glares. “I’m not asking for a lot here, guys.
We’ve had a tumultuous relationship so far.
You spent most of it trying to make me miserable enough to leave here and give you Ebron.
Oh, not just that though, you’ve been trying to make me miserable while also peeing all over me and claiming me as your own, while not really seeming to like me in the least bit.
If I were to guess at your feelings, I’d assume that you really want to fuck me, and that you don’t like the idea of Sevrin stepping into your territory, and that’s why you’re getting all weird now about what we are to each other.
You didn’t really care about how I saw you before Sevrin. ”
“That’s not true,” Gareth says angrily, but he looks hurt.
Alaric has the demeanor of a dog who's been kicked.
I just stare. That’s not how things have been between us, right? Our night together was everything. I’ve never felt that connected to anyone in my life. While I was holding her, I could picture our whole lives together. Marriage, her pregnancy, kids. Her, always in my arms.
“Just give us a chance to show you we want more than that,” Alaric says softly. “Can you do that?”
After a minute, she nods. “It’ll just take some time. We have a connection, but that doesn’t mean a lot without trust.”
Something inside me eases. “We do have a connection. Remember that.”
“We can earn your trust,” Alaric adds.
“We’ll work for it,” I say, and I mean it.
Gareth comes closer, kneels down, and brushes a kiss to her lips. “You’ll see.”
Our responses earn us a smile. “I can’t wait.”
We head for the door, and I’m sure my brothers feel as confused as I am. We have to earn her trust? How? More sex? How does a person… earn trust?
Outside the door, the Hollowborn leans casually, looking bored. Two guards have moved to stand at the end of the hall, watching him, and I wonder if they just decided to do it on their own, or if someone instructed them to keep an eye on him.
“All done?” he asks, smugness in his voice, and I really want to punch him.
He didn’t just get his heart ripped out. He wasn’t just told to do something impossible that makes no sense. Somehow, he’s already earned Harper’s trust in a much shorter amount of time. Not just her trust, but a place in her bed.
Pushing away from the wall, he heads towards us. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of Harper.”
I don’t know what comes over me. He’s in my space, talking about my woman, and something just snaps.
My fist goes out and strikes him in the cheek.
His head snaps back, but, somehow, he remains standing.
He cricks his neck, like I didn’t just hit him with all my force, like he’s just stretching.
As he continues forward, pushing past my shoulder, he says, “We both know that came from a place of jealousy. You get one of those. The next time, I do something about it.”
Then he enters Harper’s room, shutting the door behind him.
All three of us turn and look at the door, feeling helpless. The Hollowborn gets Harper. And us? We get left in the cold. All because we have no idea how to be the men she needs.
Our father taught us a lot, but not what we really needed to know. Not how to show the woman we love that we love her.
And that’s all we really need to know what to do right now. At least if we ever want to be happy.