Chapter 13 - Chris #2
“Is there something on your mind? Did we do something wrong—”
“I’d like to be alone.” Her voice comes out flat, careful. “Please.”
I don’t know what to do with that. I open my mouth to press further, some instinct insisting I need to understand what just went wrong, and Sinth’s hand closes around my arm before I get the chance.
“Not now,” he says, low enough that only I catch it.
The carriage travels down the road, and the entire time, no word is spoken. Not a single sound is made.
Sinth pulls me aside the moment we’re back at the palace, waiting until she’s been ushered off toward her nest with Wayne trailing after her.
“I need to talk to her, Sinth,” I say, my quiet voice laced with a hint of desperation and urgency.
“No. You need to leave her be tonight,” he says.
“I want to understand what happened,” I insist. “I want to know what we did wrong so we’ll avoid it next time.”
“Listen, I want that information too. But right now, she’s not in the right frame of mind to speak with any of us.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, maybe because we all rejected her once and almost had her beheaded only to fuck her the moment her heat flared?”
I rub the back of my neck with one hand.
“Chris, you spent the better part of two weeks telling her she wasn’t worth wanting,” he continues, “and tonight, being in heat, she let herself want you anyway—want us. The Kings who once rejected her as their mate.” His voice stays even, but there’s an edge under it I rarely hear from him.
“Do you understand now why she’s keeping her distance… why she can’t even look at us?”
I don’t have an answer. And a part of me envies how he gets her so easily.
“Before that, she was taken by traders. Drugged, sold, nearly executed on our orders within the same day. Then swindlers grabbed her tonight, and would’ve done God-knows-what if we hadn’t arrived on time.” Sinth’s jaw tightens at the memory. “That’s the summary of the last two weeks of her life.”
Silence.
“Tell me, Chris, do you even understand what those words you’ve said to her cost her?” He studies me, almost pitying me. “She let three strangers into her body tonight because her newly awoken body can’t help but react to us. That’s not the same as trusting us. Don’t confuse the two.”
The words land harder than I expect, settling somewhere under my ribs and refusing to move.
I think of her face in that throne room, the moment I called her weak. I think of the wall she’s kept up around herself since, brittle at the edges but never fully lowered, not even tonight, not even skin against skin.
I think of how easily I dismissed all of it as fraud, as inconvenience, as a problem to be solved through evidence rather than a person standing in front of me asking, without words, to simply be wanted.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” I say finally, quieter than I mean to.
“You can’t. Well, not tonight anyway.” Sinth’s expression softens slightly. “Give it time. Let her rest. Then show her the real you afterward.”
He leaves me standing in the corridor with that, and I don’t have anything left to say in my own defense.
Somehow, it feels like this whole thing is my fault and the guilt is eating me up from the inside out.
Wayne finds me an hour later, sitting on a bench in the same corridor, staring at nothing in particular.
“Well, this is a sight.” He leans against the wall beside me, arms crossed, that usual grin only half in place. “Chris Winterborne, brooding in a hallway. Should I be concerned, or is this just Tuesday for you now?”
“Not now, Wayne.”
“Relax, I’m not here to rub anything in.” He glances toward the far end of the corridor, toward her door. “Rough night for everyone, I think. Even you, apparently, though I never thought I’d see the day you looked properly rattled by a woman. Or her lack of…attention.”
My jaw locks. “I’m not rattled.”
“Sure. That’s why you’re sitting in a hallway at this hour instead of sleeping like a reasonable person.
” He studies me for a moment, and something in his usual carelessness drops away, just slightly.
“For what it’s worth, she didn’t turn away from you because of tonight.
Her actions are more or less a reaction to everything bad that’s happened to her before. ”
“Sinth already gave me that lecture. I don’t need more of it.”
“Good. Needs repeating, apparently, since you’re still sitting here looking like someone kicked your favorite hound.” He pushes off the wall, considering something.
Silence.
“You know what actually might help? Stop trying to fix it with words. You’re terrible with words when it matters, always have been. Show her instead. Consistently. Every day, not just when it’s convenient for your pride.”
I look at him, surprised despite myself. “Did you just offer me a free piece of advice without being a dick?”
“Don’t get used to it.” He grins again, though there’s less mockery in it than usual. “I’m serious, though. She doesn’t need you to explain yourself. She needs you to be different, over time, long enough that she actually believes it.”
I don’t answer right away, turning the words over, testing them against everything Sinth already said and finding no real argument against either of them.
“Since when did you and Sinth become so smart?” I mean that as a joke.
“We’ve always been smart,” he says. “You’ve just been too dumb to notice.”
I huff, a faint grin playing on my lips.
“Don’t get it twisted.” He claps a hand on my shoulder, harder than necessary. “We’re not doing this because we like you, Chris. We’re doing it because all three of us are stuck sharing her, whether you make peace with that or not.”
It’s a joke. And for once, I actually get it.
“Besides, I’d rather we figure out how to do that well instead of watching you set fire to it out of stubbornness.”
He laughs and walks off before I can find a response. I’m left alone in the corridor with the taste of his words and Sinth’s both settling somewhere I can’t easily dismiss.
For the first time since this began, I find myself agreeing with both of them without an argument ready to counter either one.
That, more than anything tonight, unsettles me most of all.