Page 121 of Onyx Cage: Volume II
A muscle tensed in her jaw, her expression going rigid.
“You’re right,” she said in a tone that very much implied otherwise. “I’m being ridiculous. You have made it amply apparent on nowfourseparate occasions that it makes no difference to either you or the alliance whether I even stay in the same kingdom as you, so I suppose I’m the only one making an issue of it.”
I thought back to the occasions in question, notably the first one.
“Feel free to recall that you wouldn’t even consider my proposal before I made that offer.”
“Is that what you think?” She shook her head, dislodging several curls from where she had tucked them behind her ear.
Then she met my gaze with a challenge I knew all too well, jade eyes blazing into mine.
“Evander, if you had come into that council room and proposed a real marriage, there would have been no question. No debate. No talk of territories or trade or advantages.”
I froze, at a rare loss for words while the truths she had just hurled at me settled into place in my mind, subverting all the things I thought I knew.
“Instead,” she barreled on before I could latch on to a single coherent thought, “you waltzed in talking about ownership andbenefits and how little you cared if I was around. So I got to spend a week agonizing over whether to choose the man who wanted to share a life with me, even if I could never truly return his feelings, or the one I loved with every last broken piece of my soul but refused to admit he wanted a real marriage with me.”
Her breath hitched in her throat, her next words barely audible when she spoke. “And I am sick to death of waiting for you to want things that you don’t.”
I inhaled sharply in surprise while words and phrases echoed in my head.
The one I loved with every last broken piece of my soul.
Waiting for you to want things you don’t.
It was rare—so, so rare that I had cause for regret. The life I had lived and the choices I had been forced to make did not leave room for second-guessing my decisions, not if I wanted to survive with a fraction of my soul intact.
Or survive at all, in some cases.
But remorse washed over me when pain pinched the corners of her eyes, because she earnestly believed that I didn’t care if she stayed here, didn’t care that the only thing I had allowed myself to want in this lifetime would be out of my grasp and out of my protection.
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it. Words had gotten us into this mess, and I wasn’t willing to carelessly fling more half-truths as kindling into the fire that was burning our tenuous relationship to the ground.
She spun around, pulling her hair over one shoulder and gesturing to the buttons on the back of her gown.
“Let’s just get this over with,” she rasped, her tone resigned to the point of emptiness. “I won’t lie to my people, and we don’t even have the option of lying to yours. If we’re giving them an alliance, we can at least give them a real one.”
Giving them an alliance. Like my marriage to her was a burnt offering for our kingdoms rather than the only thing in this world I would have—and had—risked my own clan for.
She truly had no idea.
All the games we had played, and I had so wrongly assumed that somewhere in the subtext she had seen the truth of what I was willing to sacrifice to be with her. But she didn’t understand that her absence was a sacrifice for me, one I would have made for her sake alone.
I stared at the endless row of pearls while I contemplated the meaning of the word broken, how it applied to me and to us, but never to the single boldest, bravest person that I knew.
Finally, I lifted my hands to her top button, determined that by the time I reached the bottom one, she would understand there was no part of me that wished to merelyget this over with.Any of it.
My fingers skimmed along her bare skin, and energy surged from her body to mine. She sighed, the sound echoing in the ocean of silence that was drowning us both.
“You are not the broken one,” I began, unlooping the first pearl as I tried to piece together the things I needed her to understand. “And the life you would have in Bear, away from your family, sharing an estate with a woman who tried to kill you—and very nearly succeeded—dealing with Socairan prejudice and superstitions and politics, is a far cry from the one you have here.”
Here, where she was happy and surrounded by people who loved her. People she loved in return. The constant ridiculousness and chaos and noise of her kingdom, instead of a culture she found stifling with a man she hadn’t wanted to marry.
Except that, apparently, she had.
Her shoulders relaxed incrementally, and she leaned into me. Emboldened to go on, I unfastened another several buttons, revealing the creamy skin beneath, punctuated by the occasional lash mark. The twin scars to my own.
“I thought that by keeping my own desires to myself, I would allow you to make that decision unburdened.”I thought that if I told you how badly I wanted you to stay, you would grow to resent me for it, but tonight’s rare display of hurt was so much worse. “I see now, that was an oversight on my part.”