Page 78 of Tarnished Crown

Rowan,

I am sure you have heard by now that my brother has declined the terms of your return. He is concerned that if we are not able to marry, your presence will only serve as a distraction.

A distraction from what? My heart beat a staccato in my eardrums, a warning that I wished I could heed. But I kept reading.

He has resumed talks with Ram.

There it was. Galina. The niece to the Duke of Clan Ram, the girl he had been all but engaged to before I came along.

My attempts to sway him have been unsuccessful.

All I can think about is you telling me you didn’t want this feeling, the kind of love that motivated people to go to war. I thought it was silly, at the time, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about those words every day when it takes everything I have to avoid doing just that.

For all your comments about Socairan society, I have never wished things were different more than I do right now. But short of starting an actual war or abandoning my clan, I have little choice. Maybe you were right all along, and neither of us ever did.

I truly am sorry, for everything.

Theodore

I waited for the crushing wave of grief to come, but I seemed to be relatively numb. Perhaps it was because after everything that had happened the past six months, this felt aligned with the rest of my life.

Or perhaps it was because in some ways, I had been expecting this since the day I was forced to walk away from Theo at the negotiations, and even more so since I got his last letter.

I pulled my bracelet out of the nightstand drawer. My wrists had been healed for a while now, but I had never put it back on. That felt significant, somehow.

Spinning the lotus flower in my fingers, I finally took a moment to acknowledge what I had known on some level for a while now.

Theo and I were no more.

He was going to marry someone else.

He was never going to hold me in his solid arms or twirl my hair around his finger or kiss me like I was the most cherished thing in the universe again.

Each thought crushed me a little more, but after everything else that had happened, I didn’t feel precisely broken.

Did that mean I had never been in that kind of love with him to begin with? And if so, what did that say about me?

Maybe I just wasn’t capable of that feeling. It should have been a relief, but somehow, that felt worse, like the absence of what I thought was there was causing me nearly as much grief as losing it.

The way my parents had talked about their love, it was like it was inevitable, like no force in the universe could have kept them apart.

Whereas every force seemed to be conspiring to keep Theo and me apart.

Worse still, they seemed to be succeeding.

CHAPTER51

Evander returned to find me tracing the edges of my bracelet and staring into space. The tears never did come. In some ways, it would have been easier if they had.

But this still didn’t quite feel real.

“Shall I give you and that bracelet a moment, Lemmikki?” His tone was more reserved than usual.

I sighed. “Shall I assume Kirill told you what the letter entailed?”

“Unless you would prefer to assume that I enjoy risking the safety of my entire estate bynotmonitoring the correspondence of my prisoner and my enemy.”

I shook my head, squeezing the charm between my fingers. “Well, I’m surprised you aren’t in a better mood then. Isn’t this all you ever wanted? To eliminate the possibility of analliancebetween Lochlann and Elk?”