Chapter 58 The Shalvar Throne Room #2
“You are mine,” Colsar said. The air tightened around us. I felt it before I saw it, the pressure of his power gathering, pressing inward, the room itself responding to him the way it always did when he stopped holding back. The marble trembled beneath my feet.
My own power rose to meet it without thought, light gathering beneath my ribs and driving outward, meeting his pressure and forcing it back. The torches along the walls flare.
We stood in the middle of it, neither of us yielding.
"No," I said. "I am not something you set aside and return to when it suits you."
I held his eyes. "I am not a book you place on a shelf and pick up when you feel like it. Shelved books get taken, Colsar. By anyone who wants them."
He looks at me as though he has been struck.
“Do not say that,” he says, low. The pressure eased, leaving the room slowly until it was only air again.
“I love you,” he said. The words sounded raw.
“You are everything to me. I cannot lose you. Whatever you want, Asharin. You always get it. I will do anything to keep you.”
My answer came easily. “I will not be this. The woman who waits and wonders.” I almost laughed because I sounded more certain than I felt. All I truly want is for him to want me, to need me, like before.
Jessamy laughed softly. “You see?” she murmured. “Even now she rages while you look at me.”
Colsar moved before her voice had fully faded. His hand closed around her throat. There was a flash of power.
When he released her, Jessamy collapsed to the marble floor. The silence that followed felt enormous. Colsar turned toward the doors.
“Bring in the Duke.”
I do not understand the purpose. He would not kill him. Colsar was a Rathmor. Politics and practicality always took precedence. It had to.
Anything else would mean—
The guards obeyed immediately. Jessamy’s father, the Duke of Larafyn, entered moments later with his escort.
He stopped the moment he saw her body. “My lord,” he whispered.
For a fraction of a second, I could see something calculated behind Colsar’s eyes. The Kyvarins. The negotiations. The place this man held at the edge of it all. Then it disappeared. Colsar looked at me as he descended the steps slowly. “For you,” he said.
The Duke barely had time to draw breath before Colsar reached him. His hand closed at the man’s throat and crushed. Bone gave under the pressure. The body dropped before the echo of it finished sounding.
The guards shouted. Steel tore free from scabbards.
Colsar did not turn. “For you,” he murmured again.
Something in him breaks open. Heat surges through the room and his form tears into something larger, darker, the shift taking him in a single violent motion.
He is on them before the first blade clears. A body hits the marble. Then another. He moves through them without pause, each strike final, each man falling before the next can react. By the time the last tries to raise his weapon, it is already over.
He stands among the bodies, breathing once, then looks at me again.
“For you,” he said softly.
I did not step back. I should have been horrified. Any reasonable woman would have been. Yet as I looked at him standing there in the ruin he had made for me, something colder and more complicated moved through my chest.
He had not hesitated. Not once. The court, the alliances, the fragile balance of power that held the kingdom together. None of it had mattered. Only me.
Colsar lifted his eyes to mine. “What else?” he asked quietly.
The doors opened again. The Sovereign entered. He stopped when he saw the carnage spread across the marble floor. His gaze moved from Jessamy to her father, then across the fallen guards.
Finally he looked at me, then at Colsar. After a long silence he turned toward the witnesses gathering uncertainly at the doorway. “The Duke and his daughter were discovered plotting betrayal,” he said calmly.
“King Colsar executed them to make an example.”
He held Colsar’s eyes. “As his first act as Sovereign.”
Colsar said nothing. The Sovereign stepped closer, surveying the bodies. “You have refused the throne long enough,” he said mildly.
“Apparently the matter has resolved itself.” He clapped a hand against Colsar’s shoulder.
Then he glanced once more at the blood darkening the marble. “Now clean up your fucking mess, Colsar.”
The throne room slowly emptied.
Servants came hesitantly into the chamber, pausing at the sight of the bodies scattered across the marble. Guards moved to begin the grim work of lifting them, their movements stiff with unease.
No one looked directly at either of us.
Colsar watched them with mild impatience, as though the entire affair had been an inconvenience rather than a massacre.
Eventually he lifted a hand. “Leave them,” he said.
The servants froze.
“Out.”
They did not argue. Within moments the throne room was empty again. The doors closed. Silence settled over the chamber.
Colsar turned back toward me. “There,” he said calmly. “It’s finished.”
I stared at him. The ease in his voice made something inside me tighten.“You killed half the court,” I said.
“Yes.”
He sounded almost puzzled by my tone. “They were a problem.”
“And that solves everything?”
“It solves the part that matters.”
He stepped closer, studying my face as though expecting relief.
Instead I turned away from him. “I am still upset with you.” The words came out colder than I intended.
Colsar blinked. “With me?"
“Yes.”
He frowned slightly, as if trying to understand the shape of a problem he thought he had already eliminated. “I removed the threat.”
“That was not the threat.”
His expression darkened. "What are you talking about?"
"I am sorry," I said. "I am sorry I still need you to be present when the kingdom is not burning."
Colsar stiffened. "We both know that it is easier for you," I continued. "When there is something to fight. Something to fix. Something to destroy. That is when you know exactly how to love me. It is the quiet that loses you."
He crossed the distance between us in two strides. "That is just it," he said, his voice rising in a way it almost never did. "I was not there to fight when you needed me to be. And now I am trying."
The rawness of it stopped me for a moment. Not because it was wrong. Because it was true, and he knew it, and he was saying it anyway, which was its own kind of courage from a man who did not often admit to falling short of anything.
His hands closed around my arms. “I am trying.” His voice dropped. “I will be everything you need me to be.”
I met his eyes without flinching. “You say that now.”
“I have said it from the beginning.”
“Did you say it while another woman stood half naked in front of you?”
His jaw tightened. “That woman is dead.”
“That was not the point.”
The silence between us stretched.
Colsar followed my gaze as it drifted toward the stains still darkening the marble floor.
A faint look of irritation crossed his face. “Short of raising her again to kill her twice, I fail to see what you expect from me.”
I said nothing.
He sighed softly. “If the sight offends you,” he added, “we can remedy that as well.”
He lifted one hand. Power rose, hot and immediate.
The air tightened, light warping under it.
Flame broke across the marble. Jessamy’s body caught first. Then her father.
Then the guards who had fallen beside them.
The fire spread swiftly and unnaturally, devouring cloth, flesh, and steel alike until the bodies collapsed into drifting ash.
Colsar lowered his hand. The flames vanished. Only faint grey powder remained scattered across the polished stone. He regarded the floor for a moment, as if confirming the task had been completed to his satisfaction.
Then he looked back at me. “There,” he said again. His voice carried the quiet certainty of someone who believed the matter had finally been settled.
But the tightness in my chest only grew. “That,” I said slowly, “was not the point either."
Colsar frowned. “What point?”
“The point,” I said, “is that you let it happen.”
“She posed no threat to you.”
“That is not what I said.”
I stepped closer. “You stood there while she undressed in front of you,” I said quietly. “After everything she did to me in Veynar. After you watched her mock me in front of half the court.”
His jaw tightened. “Her House was here to discuss alliances.”
“She was humiliating me.”
“She is dead.”
“That was after.”
Silence stretched between us.
“You keep trying to fix the aftermath,” I continued. “You keep burning the consequences.” My voice hardened. “But you refuse to understand that the problem began with you.”
Colsar stared at me. “I did nothing.”
“Yes,” I said softly. “Exactly.”
For the first time something uncertain moved across his face. "What do you want me to do?"
I held his eyes. "I want to know that no one will ever be able to humiliate me again." The words hung between us. Then I shook my head slightly. "No," I said. "That is not it."
His brow drew together.
"I want to know that I matter to you." My voice did not rise but it did not soften either.
"That I am not a prize or an object or a thing.
I am not something you protect. I am not something you set aside when it is convenient.
" I stepped closer without thinking. "I am your partner.
The person you choose. The person you want to spend your time with. "
He went very still.
For a moment neither of us moved, the space between us charged with everything that had been building since before we arrived here, since before the snow and the undead and the children and all the ways this life had asked more of us than either of us had known it would.
Then he crossed the distance in a single step, like he could not help it, his hands coming to me, not rough and not forcing but certain, as though touching me was the only answer he had that he trusted completely.
"I have never once looked at any of this and thought it was enough on its own," he said, his thumb moving along my jaw. "It has always been you. It has only ever been you."
Something in my chest pulled tight. I wanted to lean into him, let his certainty be enough, let the warmth of him close over everything that hurt.
I missed him. That was the worst part of it.
He was right here, close enough to feel, and still there was distance between us, something that had grown without either of us stopping it.
I loved him. Completely and inconveniently, in a way that made all of this harder. If I had loved him less, I could have walked away without this ache, without caring how easily his certainty cut.
But I did love him. And he loved me. I had never doubted that. I just did not know how we had gotten here.
I stepped back. The distance returned between us. His hand lingered where I had been for a fraction too long before falling.
Something crossed his face, quieter than anger, deeper than confusion. The look of a man who had given everything he knew how to give and still watched it fall short.
The silence stretched.
He exhaled slowly and something in him reset. "Then I will fix it,” he said.
I blinked. "What?"
“I will come to dinner more. You will know how much you matter to me.”
I looked at him. He believed that completely, and I believed that he believed it.
That was almost the hardest part. In his mind the board had been cleared.
Jessamy was ash. He would come to dinner.
The problem handled. He was looking at me the way he looked at everything he had just fixed, waiting for the relief to show on my face.
He did not understand that none of those things were the problem.
He was. The way he left me waiting, the way he stood there while she undressed and called it alliance, the way he burned everything after and thought it proved something.
He loved me, I knew that. He just did not understand that it was not enough to destroy for me, he had to be there.
He reached for me again, his hand coming to my wrist, softer now, like he expected me to stay. “There," he said quietly. "It is done."
I held his eyes and felt the pull of him, the wanting of him, the grief of standing this close to someone and feeling this far away.
"It is not," I said.
The certainty in his expression slipped for an instant.
I turned before he could answer.