Chapter 64
F or all her bravado, Rowan had not slept any more than I did. Her breathing was uneven, and she fidgeted throughout the night. Each inhale and whisper of blankets sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet space, when I was so frustratingly aware of her.
When I headed downstairs early the next morning, tense and bleary-eyed, I could only be grateful that Taras was too worse for wear to be perceptive. Though the same could not be said of Luca or Kirill, both of whom cast me unwelcome probing glances when Rowan walked downstairs and I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.
I didn’t have it in me to pretend with her today.
It had been stupid to give in last night. If that glass hadn’t broken, where would we have wound up?
And how much harder would it have been to walk away?
As it was, even the vodka last night hadn’t been enough for me to forget what her lips felt like against mine. How for a moment, when politics and blood debts had fallen away, it had almost felt like we could belong to one another.
Before I remembered that those things—politics and blood debts—were the only reasons she was here. I had known better than to let myself want her.
Now it was impossible to think about anything else.
I needed sleep. That was all. Time to put all of this in the back of my mind. Then we could go back to whatever the hell we had been before.
Since Luca and I had already ironed out most of the details, there wasn’t much to say other than goodbye. Taras smiled a full, genuine smile when Mila told him goodbye, and I let it ease some of the darkness creeping into my soul.
He deserved a wife who made him happy, after all that he had sacrificed for our clan. For me.
When they left and we went to mount our horses, I finally forced myself to look at Rowan. I pushed all of my emotion as far into the recesses of my mind as it would go so that I could help her onto her horse and feel nothing.
Not how warm she was or how her body seemed to respond to the proximity of mine. How last night had done nothing to calm the energy that crackled between us. If anything, it was only more intense, like a rabid beast after its first taste of blood.
It wanted to go for the kill.
I ignored it, and her—well, as much as that was possible when she was settled in front of me on the horse. Rather than lean against me like she had on the ride here, she seemed to be doing her damnedest to avoid touching me at all. It was both counterproductive to the reason we shared a horse and twice as awkward as the alternative.
We managed to avoid speaking directly to one another the entire day. Rowan even casually asked Taras when we were stopping instead of me, and it definitely didn’t go unnoticed by all of the men who looked sideways at us.
Just as it definitely didn’t irritate me.
Taras, of course, looked to me, since I was the one in charge of that decision. So I answered him directly, speaking over Rowan’s head. He then relayed my answer to the princess sitting no more than five inches from me.
Kirill cleared his throat awkwardly, and Dmitriy took a swig of what I was fairly certain was vodka. But no one commented outright.
When we reached our shared room at the inn and climbed into our shared bed, I assumed we would both pretend to fall asleep without speaking again. So it surprised me when Rowan addressed me directly instead.
“I’ve been thinking…I’m mostly healed now, and armed. There’s no reason I can’t return to my room at the estate.”
I froze.
“No,” I said before I could even think through the reasons. Taking a breath, I doubled down on my stance. I didn’t disagree with her clear desire for space, but sharing a room at the estate was about more than our mutual unreasonable panic at being separated. “Mairi comes bearing orders from my father, feigned or otherwise. I might be limited in how I can intervene, but I am still the only one who can so much as question those without consequence.”
It had been one thing when she wasn’t directly Mairi’s target, but now, my stepmother felt thwarted by her. She would be looking for a chance at revenge.
Putting aside my concern for the princess, any one of my men would die before letting Mairi take her again. And she would be happy for a reason to order their execution.
Rowan sucked in a breath. “I don’t know that she will come after me again. That was—that was more of a warning.”
Something in her tone was telling, a trace of guilt or confession. It hadn’t occurred to me that she knew more than she was letting on, because she was usually so obvious in her attempts to hide information.
But then, she hadn’t spoken about it at all.
“A warning for what?” I growled, turning to better read her features.
Her eyes had gone distant, empty, and it was too reminiscent of the days after the flogging.
As furious as I had been when Mairi had been targeting me, it was nothing to the rage I felt at the idea that she nearly murdered Rowan for a storms-damned warning.
If I was being honest with myself, she wasn’t the only one I was angry with, though. I had been killing myself to keep Rowan safe while she withheld information about the motives of the person I was protecting her from.
“Because I know who she is,” she said in a small voice. “She’s not just a Lochlannian lady. She’s royalty.”
“Related to you?” I put together.
“My father’s aunt Ava. She didn’t want him on the throne. She hates my family, and she wanted to punish them in any way she could.”
“Through you.”
All this time, I had felt so guilty that she attacked Rowan because of me. But it was about her, all along.
Of course, I was still the one who had brought her to Bear in the first place.
“Yes. I wanted to tell you, but things were so complicated as it was. She said she had spies in Elk, that she could get to Davin.” She huffed out a pained breath. “You were already protecting me, and I didn’t want to add one more thing for you to take on yourself. I knew if I kept my mouth shut, for a change, she would leave him alone. Davin is entirely from her side of the old Lochlannian border. She doesn’t hate him the way she does me.”
It eased the betrayal that had been creeping unbidden into my gut, even as I told myself it wasn’t rational to begin with. We were enemies by kingdom. She had no reason to trust me with the truth.
So she had suffered in silence for her family, once again. She made it so impossible to hate her the way I wished I could. The way I needed to.
“You didn’t notice the lips?” she added on when I didn’t respond.
I pictured my stepmother’s face, much to my displeasure. The thin line of her pursed lips, the cruel twist when she was ordering one of her punishments. It contrasted sharply with the mischievous identical grins worn by Rowan and her cousin.
“No,” I said honestly. “I only noticed because you and Davin have the exact same smirk. Mairi—Ava—never smiles.”
I tried to process the rest of what she had said, my mind reeling. Mair—Ava had a vendetta against her even before she had glared at her through an entire flogging.
I shook my head. “But if anything, that makes it twice as likely that she will try something else. You did a mediocre job, at best, of pretending to be beaten by her.”
She let out a bitter exhale. “I was beaten by her.”
Was that what she thought? I had seen grown soldiers weeping openly after a single lash. Rowan had screamed, but she had held her own.
“No. You weren’t,” I assured her. “Truth be told, Lemmikki, you held up better than most of the soldiers do.”
She took in a breath, her shoulders easing, and it made me wonder how long she had been needing to hear that for.
“And you?” she said a bit more easily. “Are you ever going to tell me what you did?”
I could have shut her down, but part of me didn’t want to return to the awkwardness of the ride here. Maybe I also felt like she deserved to know she wasn’t the only one who had been scarred because of my stepmother’s whims.
“Mairi— Ava —” That was going to take some getting used to. “Has always had her preferred methods of punishment,” I admitted.
I was expecting a sympathetic murmur or even just a nod of solidarity. I was not prepared for the look of pure, unrelenting fury that crossed over Rowan’s features.
“How many times?” she demanded.
When she had grabbed her dagger all those months ago in the carriage, I hadn’t been afraid. Not only could I out-power her, but for all my jokes, I hadn’t actually thought she could murder someone in cold blood.
Her tone now had me rethinking that assumption. I wasn’t sure what to do with that.
My aunt had taken care of me, but she had been a kind, soft person, like her youngest son. No one had ever raged this way for me.
Maybe Rowan would have felt that way for anyone.
“I stopped counting,” I answered. It wasn’t a lie. The memories bled together now, dark rooms and the crack of a whip.
“I hate her,” Rowan snarled, every bit the feral princess I had so often accused her of being.
“So do I,” I agreed with a sigh.
She took several deep breaths in a visible effort to calm herself before narrowing her eyes.
“Then why not...” she didn’t finish her sentence, but her meaning was clear.
“Dispose of her?” I offered.
She nodded, the gesture awkward from her position against her pillow.
“I tried, once.” At least, I liked to think my father would have found a way to get rid of her if he had seen her in action. “But I trusted the wrong person. They told someone who then informed Mairi. And she made sure I wasn’t able to attempt anything like that for a long time.”
I wasn’t sure why I stopped short of telling her it had been Korhonan. It felt like an unnecessarily spiteful detail to add, all things considered.
“And now?” she asked.
“And now, she can’t do much to a fully grown heir, so it’s easier to play her games. I can’t fight a war on two fronts.” As much as I hated it, my stepmother was an occasional ally in the mission to protect my people from their insane duke. “Ultimately, it’s more important to prevent my father from ordering...the things he orders sometimes.”
“If my father knew...” she trailed off, fists clenching around her pillow.
It was something I had never pondered, whether there were people in Lochlann who hated her as much as I did. Not that it would have made a difference.
I explained as much to Rowan. “There is no clan in Socair that would tolerate an outsider harming a Clan Wife, no matter the circumstances. It wouldn’t have mattered, even if I had known who she was. War would be an inevitability if that happened.”
“Well, there go my plans to eviscerate her with my booby dagger.”
A dark, unexpected laugh escaped me. Of course her inappropriate dagger had an equally inappropriate name.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to go back to what we had been before, some version of friends.
When her green eyes met mine in a shared understanding, I knew the thought to be a lie. We had started out as less than friends and morphed into something entirely other.
Whatever else we were, we could never be something as simple as friends.