Chapter Thirty-Eight
Adeline
Ger lingered by the door for a moment after they’d returned to her rooms, almost as though he knew.
Expected it, whether because he’d hoped for resolution on Adeline’s behalf, or because he’d seen the look on Kai’s face as she’d parted from him without a word.
He tensed all the same when the knock came, shooting Adeline a dark look that she hadn’t the energy to return.
“I am at my limit with you two,” he muttered.
But he opened the door all the same.
“You’ve got Kellehever on your door tonight,” she heard him say, “so you have maybe an hour until he wakes up. I’ll give you some time alone, but be it on your head if you’re caught.”
He threw a quick glance to where Adeline stood warming herself by the struggling hearth, his eyes softening just a touch when they met hers. Then he side-stepped Kai, rounded the vacant gard’s post outside the door, and disappeared.
Kai watched him go, wordless for a moment before he finally entered the room.
She could tell by the long seconds he took to close the door that he was steeling himself.
Or perhaps that was for her benefit. When he did turn, slowly, his eyes flicked over her face, the faint sconcelight finding warmth in the gold streaks of his irises even beneath the serious set of his brow.
She folded her arms under his inspection, and watched his lips tense in response before he glanced away, eyeing the exit as though he might give up altogether and retreat.
But he set his jaw and turned around again.
“We could use another closed door, I think. Let’s not do this here.”
Adeline dropped her arms.
“Do this?” She echoed, but he had already taken several of his impossibly long strides across the room, and he did not turn around. She huffed as she hurried after him, reaching for his elbow to draw him up before he could reach her bedroom. “Hold on, are you angry at me?”
“I am just—” he began, then cut himself off with a sharp inhale, lowering his voice before he turned to her. “I am perplexed.”
“You can’t possibly think I’m being unreasonable.”
“At the risk of surprising you, Adeline, yes, I do.”
She threw her hands up. “Because I don’t want you to marry her?”
“Because these are extenuating circumstances,” he gritted, “and I am asking for the very same grace I’ve extended to you.”
Adeline could only blink at him.
“What in the world does that mean?”
Kai’s jaw worked a moment, lips thinning with the force of his own restraint.
“I haven’t asked you why Avette is hanging Gerard over my head,” he said, so slowly she could hear the pulse beneath his every word.
Adeline could feel her own face fall, or perhaps that was the blood draining from her cheeks.
She’d forgotten. Self-centred as it was, she’d forgotten all about her charade with Ger because it had served its purpose and they’d been left alone.
A blessing at very little cost—to her, at least, because she knew what it meant.
“I kissed him,” she blurted out. Kai’s eyes fell shut, and like his every movement held a tether on her own, her heart faltered. “Not because I wanted to, not because either of us wanted to. It was for show. It was a way to hold off the Queen’s Gard and buy us some privacy. That’s all.”
He opened his eyes, and when they met hers, she almost wished he hadn’t. There was too much pain there, and far too much control leashing it. She’d hurt him, and he was holding it back—because he knew he’d have to hurt her too.
“I believe you,” he said hoarsely. “And I hate that it happened. And I understand that it had to. And I’m asking you to understand, too. That was for show, and so is this. It has to happen; I have to marry Avette.”
She reeled at the sting of his words, but he stared fixedly back at her. Adeline backed up a step before she could catch herself; when she spoke, her voice was thick.
“It’s not comparable, Kai. You wouldn’t watch me marry someone else. You wouldn’t.”
Kai didn’t answer for a long moment, but the weight of his eyes grew with every passing second until she felt, not for the first time, that he was peering right through her skin.
Poring over her inner workings, like a single glance could bring him the perfect combination of words to diffuse the tension winding through her airways, smothering her heartbeat.
It made her feel seen—it made her feel handled, too.
Her fingers curled, nails biting into her skin.
“I wouldn’t want to,” Kai said carefully.
By the way he strained the want, she knew he meant for her to infer that he’d let it happen.
That he’d be reasonable, if he had to. If it came to that.
It wouldn’t, though, not for him. He would never have to watch her walk down the aisle and take another man’s ring because it would simply never happen.
And if it did, she wouldn’t entertain the idea for a single second.
The fact that he could made her entire ribcage feel like one giant bruise, the looming thumb of tomorrow’s nuptials pressing down on the pain.
“But?” she prompted.
Nothing.
“No, go on, Kai,” she managed to grit out, gesturing broadly. “Tell me you would let me marry someone else.”
He wouldn’t look at her, though he flinched at the slight crack in her breath.
“Tell me you want to go through with this.”
She knew, in the split second before Kai reacted, that it was a step too far, too close to a cruelty.
His gaze was on fire when it snapped to hers, the air between them heating despite the clinging frost all around them.
His step toward her was thunderous, but his grasp on her arm was gentle as ever.
The contradictions rippled through him; knotted brow, fingers soft on her jaw, eyes searing, voice low.
“I don’t want to marry anyone who isn’t you, and you know it.”
Her breath disintegrated in one forceful gust.
Anyone who isn’t you.
She stared up at him, tongue numb and useless in her mouth, waiting for the moment he would blink and realise what he’d said.
Waiting for him to explain it away or qualify it somehow.
He didn’t. He only stared at her in that way of his, a devoutee looking his one and only belief in the face, equal parts awed and defiant.
The silence took on an unearthly quality, thick and shimmering on the air.
Emotion shivered physically through her until her eyes stung and her blood beat furiously at her pulse points.
She let Kai pull her closer, let him bow his head to hers; she wasn’t sure she could have stopped him if she’d tried.
“A future with you,” he said, his breath a whisper on her lips. “Adeline, that is all I want. It’s all I’ve wanted for some time now. But that future doesn’t exist unless I do this.”
When she didn’t answer, he pulled back to peer at her, but Adeline couldn’t find her own thoughts, much less her words. She could only stare back at him, a riot of pure feeling thundering through her every pore and paralysing her entirely.
Kai’s brows sloped gently together.
“You knew that,” he reminded her.
And she did.
Kai had never been afraid of putting words to his feelings.
He was never the one dragging obstacles into their path; it had been her.
Always her, reared on disdain and scared to feel anything too deeply, to love anyone too much lest her love be shrugged off or altogether ignored.
How could she expect any different, when the one person who was supposed to love her beyond reason had never seemed to care?
She’d had to protect herself, had to make it so her battered heart could continue to beat unbruised.
But Selma had cared, in her way—and she was not the same lonely child she’d once been. She never would be again.
Adeline gave a wordless nod and turned her head to kiss Kai’s palm. Then whispered into it, small, muffled, uncertain.
“Then don’t marry her.”
“Adeline.” The weight of that sigh drew the light from his face, his expression shuttering, voice falling flat. “Give me a solution, then.”
She didn’t have one, and when he tilted her face toward him once more, she knew he saw it. She rushed to speak anyway.
“You’ve made every sacrifice imaginable, Kai. It’s not fair.”
“And you think I’m being noble? I’ve told you time and time again what a selfish man I truly am.
I want you more than I don’t want this. I want your happiness more than anything I’ve ever wanted in more than six hundred years.
More than my freedom. More than my own damned kingdom.
If this is the path to a world where you’re happy, Adeline, where you’re safe, where you have what you’ve come all this way for, then I will be selfish one more time.
I’ll let her claim me for a moment, if it means I get to claim you from there on out. ”
His tone was final, his gaze already moving to the door behind her.
Her breath thickened in her lungs. “Wait.”
Kai’s soft hold on her cheek went slack, and panic swallowed her heart in a stinging flood.
His hand dropped, but she grabbed it before he could step back and yanked him closer.
So close their hands lay trapped between their chests, his heartbeat on the back of her knuckles and her own flailing pulse beating a rhythm against his wrist.
“Wait,” she whispered again.
He glanced down at their hands, and his answer was barely above a breath, gusting out of him in a pained sigh.
“Adeline, there’s nothing more to—”
“I love you.”
Kai stilled.
“I love you,” she said again, even thicker this time, breath gasping out of her with the force of her own heartbeat.
Kai’s gaze rose slowly to hers, the expression in his electric eyes unreadable. Her pulse jumped, throat tightening even as she rushed to get out every word she could.