Chapter 28. Before Luca #2
Maris flinched.
“I know how this works. All of these games you Magistrates play, I don’t want any part of it. I’m not a piece on the board. You can’t just move me any which way you want.”
“I’m not.”
“You are! You know that my heart is already bound to you. And you’re using it to put on some scheme you’ve orchestrated.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Then what?” My voice rose. “Why did you ask me to come here?”
I looked down into Maris’ face, following the sheen of moisture that covered her cheek.
The light traveled down her neck, into the opening of her chiton, making me swallow hard.
I wanted so badly to touch her. To go back to that moment in the Citadel when the world was coming apart around us and to just disappear.
“Luca,” she breathed. “I came to ask if you would marry me.”
All at once, the room went still around us. The steam, the voices, the light—it all froze in time.
“What?” The word was barely audible on my lips.
She looked a little afraid now, her skin flushed. “I want you to take vows with me.”
I moved backward, suddenly eager to put her out of reach. But she followed, hands finding my tunic and holding me in place.
“Take Magistrate Matius’ seat. Hold the faction together and when my mother is gone, I will control the other.”
My eyes jumped back and forth on hers, trying to make sense of it. “And then what?”
“And then there are no more factions. We wait for the Consul’s son to take his place and then we remake the Forum. Rebuild the Citadel.”
I was catching on to what she was saying, but I almost couldn’t comprehend it.
If we took vows, one of us would lose our family name.
Which meant that family name would lose a seat in the Forum.
It would throw the entire body of Magistrates into chaos and shift the power balances that had reinforced each other for so long.
We could even ensure that Vale became the next Consul.
If that happened, if the three of us held the most powerful seats in the Citadel, there was little that could stand in the way of us changing everything.
“Will you do it?” she said.
I stared at her. The only thing standing between me and a future I’d thought impossible was the fact that I didn’t want Maris as a political ally. I wanted her.
“I’ll only take vows with you if they’re true ones,” I said, watching her carefully. I wanted to know that she understood me. That she knew what I was asking.
She took her time in answering, and with every second that passed, my pulse was steadily climbing. “You don’t believe in the will of the gods, Luca, but I do. And I knew the moment I saw you in that garden that my life would be bound to yours. That our fates are entwined.”
She waited for me to speak, but I couldn’t. My mind was racing from one thought to the next, counting the rippling effects this would have. It was the kind of beginning that gave birth to an end.
“Let me be your family, and together, we can change everything,” she whispered, hands still twisted in my tunic.
I didn’t answer her because I didn’t need to. It all felt like an inevitability, a point in time that had already been decided. Like one of Vitrasian’s comets streaking across the sky.
I kissed her instead of speaking, my lips parting hers until the knot in my throat began to unwind. I didn’t want to feel it, but I did—that sense of something bigger happening. The cosmic pull of fate that had twisted and reforged every moment since I met her.
I could feel the shape of her through the wet silk. Slowly, my hands traveled up the curve of her hip, over her ribs. I pushed the fabric down her shoulder so that I could press my mouth there. I was imagining it—this body belonging to me.
My fingers grazed the soft skin below her collarbone, hand sliding down her breast, and when I felt the race of her heart beneath my palm, I was close to believing what she’d said—that our fates were entwined.
Her hands unclenched from my tunic and then she was tugging it up and reaching for my belt.
I walked her backward to the ledge cut into the stone, and I lifted her by the hips so her legs could come around me.
I couldn’t wait anymore. Seventeen days had felt like an eternity, and I didn’t ever want to miss her again.
I reached between us, hands sliding over hot skin until I was touching her.
Her mouth broke from mine, her head tipping back as she took me inside her.
This wasn’t like the lust I’d known. It never had been.
She wasn’t like the women I’d been with before.
Maris was a bottomless, edgeless thing. As deep as the sky the Philosophers spent their lives studying.
It was like there was no end to be found.
And there wasn’t. I didn’t know yet that we were a story that had already begun.
A tale the gods had written. And even if I’d been able to peer into the future and see how it would all end, I don’t think I would have been able to stop it.