Page 157 of Onyx Cage: Volume II
She didn’t know that, though, not that she had tried to learn. But pointing that out wouldn’t help matters, so I acquiesced—to a degree.
“I hear what you’re saying,” I finally acknowledged. “But have you considered that this has nothing to do with the fact that you’re a woman, and everything to do with the fact that you have exactly no experience with any of this?”
Her entire body stiffened. “Are you going to make another tiara comment now?”
Storms. So much for not provoking her.
“No. I...shouldn’t have said that,” I admitted. Though not untrue, I could see in hindsight that it had been unnecessary. “But I will say that I didn’t speak at my first council meeting. Storms, I didn’t speak at my first ten council meetings. I listened.”
Her jade eyes sparked with the return of her temper, and she sat forward in her seat.
“And that’s what I was doing, too, until—” She pinched her lips together, her fingers wrapped tightly around one of hercurls. After taking a breath, she tried again. “You say you want to start as we plan to go on, then you’re upset because I dare to have an opinion.”
I let out a tense breath, exasperation lining my tone when I replied.
“It was not your having an opinion that was upsetting, Lemmikki. It was the manner in which you chose to express it.” That distinction was the crux of our entire argument, one I couldn’t seem to convey to her.
Sure enough, she shook her head.
“And if I had waited, your judgment would have already been passed. So my options are…” She arched her perfectly sculpted auburn eyebrows, her mouth parted as if this was the very point to which she had been trying to lead me.
Perhaps I had been wrong about the crux of our argument. Perhaps it was this, that when push came to shove, she saw no other options besides giving voice to her opinions or being silenced in it. There was no middle ground, no third potential option wherein she lent me a small fraction of the faith she felt in her own family to make decisions about her home kingdom.
She might have been able to speak at council meetings in Lochlann, but I had observed and heard enough in my time there to know that was not a right she exercised. So perhaps it came down to this, the part of her that always seemed poised to question my humanity, even now.
“Is it so difficult to fathom that while you are learning about Bear, in the meantime, you might simply…trust my judgment?”That you might trust that in spite of the harsher decisions I’ve been forced to make, I do act with my people’s best interest in mind?
That all the things I’ve done have been for a purpose, not to satisfy some monstrous need for cruelty?
That I will not follow in my father’s blood-soaked footsteps when I finally have the freedom to take his mantle as I will?
Rowan’s expression faltered, her eyes softening ever so slightly.
“I know that today, with the...flogging,” she began, stumbling over the word. “I realize that you were being lenient. So yes, I should have trusted you.”
I waited patiently, wondering if there was a caveat hidden in the silence between us. When she didn’t have one, I took a slow dreg from my glass, relishing the burn of the vodka as I contemplated exactly how delicately I wanted to proceed.
“And what if I hadn’t been?” I asked flatly, allowing the whiskey to embolden me.
It chipped away at a piece of my internal armor to be so direct with her, but her answer mattered. And I needed to know that my feral princess wasn’t going to regret her choice to come here whenever her personal bias came into play. When I inevitably was forced to make a decision that she deemed unsavory.
“If you hadn’t been right?” she clarified.
I shook my head, gripping my glass a little tighter. “If I hadn’t beenlenient. That is not always a luxury I have, Lemmikki. In fact, it rarely is.”
Which, in retrospect, was why her reaction had bothered me so much more. The rare chance at mercy that still looked like savagery to her.
Rowan studied me, her wild curls falling over her shoulder. Her brow furrowed as her gaze slipped from mine to somewhere more distant as she considered how to respond, as I considered how much more her answer mattered to me than it should have.
She cleared her throat, meeting my eye once again.
“At the negotiations, I wasn’t going to make my counteroffer,” she said seemingly out of nowhere.
My mind raced back to those days, skipping carefully past the moment I found her entwined with Korhonan in his tent. My grip on my glass tightened again and I wondered briefly if this was it for the glass. If it would survive under the weight of my anger.
“What?” My tone was sharper than I meant it to be, but I didn’t understand what she was getting at. She had been so desperate to go back to Elk. To be his precious little wife.
“After I found out what Iiro had done, I was going to let the negotiations fizzle out, even though I knew it meant coming back to Bear,” she said, keeping her tone devoid of emotion. “Because...because I felt safest with you.”