Chapter 23 Choose – Amara
CHOOSE
AMARA
REPEATED SURGES OF intense guilt flow from Vexar into our connection. I don’t know where the guilt is coming from, but I’ll be damned if I let him brush me off.
He sits up and pulls a leg towards his chest, wrapping his elbow around his knee before scrubbing a hand over his face. “I am sorry—”
“No,” I interrupt. “I don’t need a fucking apology, I need honesty.
You’re hiding something, and I…” I let out a grunt of frustration.
“Fuck, Vexar!” I can handle a lot of things, but his cagey guilt is not one of them.
Especially right now. “If you want me to trust you at all, you need to open your fucking mouth and talk.”
His eyes stay fixed on mine, nervous but surprisingly steady. “I knew,” he says slowly. “I knew about the slave-ships.”
A stillness hangs between us for what feels like an eternity as my brain repeats his words over and over. But no matter how many times I hear them, the meaning doesn’t change. He knew about the slave-ships.
“Well, fuck,” I whisper, rubbing my hands over my eyes. “That’s, ugh… Wow.” He knew about the slave-ships. A heavy pain climbs up my spine and settles behind my heart as the implications of this settle in. “Did you know I was a slave when you met me?”
“No,” he says quickly. He’s watching me carefully, trying to gauge my response, but even I don’t know how I feel right now.
Then there’s a tickle at the back of my mind.
Like he’s trying to poke around in there.
Trying to figure me out. It feels like a violation, and a fresh rush of anger boils through me.
“No,” I say, pointing a finger at him. “You don’t get to dig around in my head.” After I say it, I realize I have no idea how to shut him out, or if it’s even possible. I try anyway, focusing on that strange sensation at the back of my mind as I imagine closing a door. And then … silence.
He opens his mouth like he might say something, but closes it again.
I think it worked.
Clutching my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking, I say, “Explain.”
“There were rumors about the ships,” he says slowly.
“At first, I did not believe them. But when they continued, I realized there might be some truth there. Marius and I launched an investigation into the rumors. We had some preliminary findings—nothing firm—but that was as far as we were allowed to take it.”
Allowed. That sinking feeling grips my spine again as a cold clarity takes root.
“Who’s Marius?” I ask. The name’s familiar, but my mind is so scattered I can’t recall why.
“My advisor and oldest friend.”
Right. He mentioned him earlier when I asked about his home. “The guy who helped raise you, right?”
He nods.
Instead of pushing forward and barking out questions, I take my time and think. He wasn’t “allowed” to continue his investigation. He also doesn’t believe his mother was here, while I’m fairly certain she was.
“Amara, I—”
“What do you mean by ‘investigate’?” I interrupt.
His gaze drops. “We searched financial records, ship-design specifications, transaction logs, everything we could, but we found very little evidence to prove the rumors were true. When I asked to send an inquisitor to confirm our findings, the Senate and my mother denied the request. I was told the rumors had already been proven false.”
As much as I want to rage at what feels like an excuse for doing nothing, something far more important has taken over my thoughts. His mother denied the request…
The rest of my lingering frustration melts away, and all I’m left with is a hollow pit in my stomach.
With a heavy heart, I ask the question I really don’t want the answer to. “You didn’t believe the rumors were false, did you?”
“I…” He trails off, and his eyes drop to his hands. His answer is clear, but he doesn’t want to say it, and that makes it hurt so much more.
“Want to try that again?” I ask.
“I do not know.”
I really thought Vexar was some bastion of honor and goodness, but he’s just as fucked up and fallible as I am.
I shake my head, disappointed that he won’t admit the truth. “If you believed what you were told by your mother and the Senate, why the guilt?” I raise my brows. “Why did you say you knew about the ships if you thought they were just rumors?”
His gaze drops to the bed between us, and my disappointment grows.
I try a different tactic. “Let me guess, you knew you were being fed a pile of shit and instead of pushing back, you just … looked the other way. And now you’re feeling guilty because you want to fuck someone who suffered because of your inaction. Am I close?”
“I trusted the Senate’s investigation. But even if I had not, what would you have had me do?”
Is he fucking serious?
The longer I stare at him, the clearer it becomes that he’s completely serious. He thinks that because the Senate said ‘no’, he couldn’t do anything. I rub my hand over my mouth, confused and unsure.
This empire profits from slavery and barbarism, while Vexar clearly disagrees with those things.
He didn’t know about the slavery, but he did know about the barbarism, and instead of pushing back, he just went along with it.
He feels guilty that he didn’t follow through on the rumors of the slave-ships, but he also didn’t think he had another option.
How is it that the guy who’s supposed to become king ends up feeling functionally powerless?
“You’re supposed to be next in line for the throne, right?”
“Yes,” he says, looking confused.
“But you didn’t feel like you could push back against your own government?”
He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “The Senate’s word is law. I cannot break the law.”
“So you let countless people get sold into slavery so you didn’t have to break the law?”
He shakes his head. “It is not that simple.”
“It is that simple,” I say. “Tell me, if there were a law that said it was illegal to save babies from burning buildings, and you saw a baby in a burning building, what would you do?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“Answer me,” I say forcefully. “Would you let the baby burn because the law said you had to?”
I watch his mind spin, searching for an answer.
Everything I know about him makes it very clear that his heart is in the right place, but it seems rules matter to him more than his own morality, and if that’s the case, I’ve tied myself to a very dangerous person.
Someone who would sacrifice anything for the sake of law and order.
“Why was the law made? Who is it meant to protect?” he finally asks.
God dammit.
“That,” I say, pointing at him. “That’s the fucking problem.
” My calm burns away in an explosion of anger.
“I thought you were better than that. I thought you were something different, but your head’s so far up your own ass that you think being a good person is the same fucking thing as being an obedient one.
But it’s not the same thing.” I suck down a deep breath, trying to keep my voice from shaking.
“Following unjust laws doesn’t mean your actions are free from consequences, Vexar!
You can’t just brush away atrocities by saying, ‘I was following the law.’ That’s …
fuck! That’s the kind of shit the worst people in human history did.
” I drag my fingers through my hair. “Are you really willing to divorce your own morality to follow some fucked up ruling? Because if that’s who you are, I need to know right the fuck now. ”
Hurt etches deep lines into his face, but he stays silent.
I let out a heavy breath. “I know you don’t agree with everything your people do.
I know you don’t agree with slavery. I know you didn’t want to kill anyone in the arena.
I can feel you’re fucking heart! But if you can’t use that pain, that regret, that horror to drive your actions, then you’re no different from Gaius or any other monster out there. ”
“I am not a monster,” he says.
I’m about to keep yelling when clarity hits me like a baseball bat to the ovaries.
Every time he asked if I was afraid of him.
The deep hurt over killing his opponent in the arena.
The proposal he refused to accept. His desire to stop those slave-ships.
The deep wound in his side. The lack of medical care.
Someone realized that Vexar isn’t the monster they needed him to be, and because of that, they don’t want him to be king. There’s no way an empire supported by slavery would allow someone like Vexar to rise to power. They wouldn’t be able to trust him.
My gut was right. He was never meant to leave here alive.
Even if we survive this place, what then? What chance do we have at stopping Gaius or those ships?
A better chance than if you were dead, a quiet voice says in the back of my mind. And it’s right. A small chance is better than no chance. I have to try.
I meet his gaze, feeling completely sure for the first time in a long while.
“Maybe you don’t see it, but it’s clear to me that you aren’t the person they wanted you to be.
You aren’t the king they wanted. You’re better.
You have a heart and you want to do the right thing, but if you don’t wake the fuck up and figure that out, none of this will matter.
We’ll both die here, and whatever chance we have of fixing this massive shit-fest will die with us.
The system you were raised in is broken and homicidal, and if you aren’t willing to disobey it, then you might as well feed us both to the fucking wolves. ”
I need him to make a choice. I need to know if he would rather die, showing obeisance to the power structures he was raised to protect, or live, and help me tear them all down.
A few seconds later, he shakes his head. “It is not broken. It is flawed, yes, but not broken.”
Hope disappears like a flame below the waves.
“Really? That’s what you took away from that?” At a complete loss on what to do, I crawl to the other side of the bed and curl up facing the wall.
“Amara,” he whispers.
I pull the sheet over me. “I’ll be over here until you either decide you’re done defending the boot on your neck, or until the guards come and execute us both.”