Page 239 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

She huffed out something between a bitter laugh and a sob. “No matter what I want, right?”

I stilled. Would I walk away from her like this? Leave her to the grief for a life we both mourned instead of staying here to dredge it back from the ashes with her?

“Do you want me to leave, Lemmikki?”

If she said yes...I would force myself to go. For now. But it would take everything I had to do it.

Another wave of tears assaulted her, and she buried her face in my chest, her fists clinging to my shirt. “No.”

It was the only word she could get out. She was breaking. And I—I had broken her. Pain lanced through my chest, like it was cracking open from the inside out.

“I’m sorry, Lemmikki. I’m so sorry.” And I was.

Sorry for the pain she was in, sorry that she felt like she had to deal with it alone, and sorry for this entire war full of impossible decisions that were slowly destroying us both.

I pressed my lips into her hair, and she cried harder.

“Were you really relieved?” she asked me.

She didn’t have to clarify what she was talking about. I could have given her the rational explanation, all the reasons this would have been terrible timing for us to have a baby.

Instead, I gave her another jagged piece of my soul.

“No, Lemmikki,” I breathed out. “I wasn’t relieved. I wanted that—want that, more than anything. A child with you. A life with you.”

She pulled back, examining my features through a cloud of tears. “Then why don’t you care enough to respect what I want?”

I could debate that I caredtoomuch to respect what she wanted, or explain to her that it wasn’t about respect at all. I would have done the same thing if it had been one of my cousins that Iiro set his sights on.

But those were arguments that would only lead us right back here.

I didn’t know how to let go of the part of myself that would go to any lengths to see her safe, but this… She might not be tortured by Iiro, but she was in agony all the same, only this time, I had caused it.

Was this really better? This reality where we had no life together, where she was sobbing alone in her bedroom over the loss of a future we had barely gotten the chance to imagine?

I squeezed my eyes shut, seeing it all over again. Her head on a spike. Her mouth open in a scream. Her blood coating the snow, just as it had the day she was flogged.

Those were always possibilities in war. As my wife, she would live her entire life targeted. Hell, that might have been true in Lochlann, too. There were rebels in her own kingdom.

The last time I had been convinced with certainty that we would both die, I had been wrong. And I was on the verge of losing her anyway.

Could I stomach the idea of her being in danger, if it meant a lifetime by her side? If it meant keeping her from feeling this way ever again?

Every part of me rebelled at the idea, but I considered her bright green eyes glistening with tears, begging me tounderstand, the hands that were still clutched in my shirt, the body and soul that were intrinsically mine – mine to protect.

From Iiro’s threats, but from this, too.

I took a deep breath, preparing to explain to her why I had left to begin with. We could never hope to move forward if she didn’t understand that much.

Talking did not come naturally to me. None of this did—but for her, I had to try.

“Before the Summit,” I began, pausing when her eyebrows rose.

She was listening, though, and her tears had died down to a few residual sniffles. So I could do this, offer her this as a small piece of penance.

“Before the Summit, I was living my life like it was someone else’s. The things I had to do, the people I had to kill and brand and unclan, the person I had to be to keep up a show of strength so that no one might guess my people were vulnerable under my father’s rule... All of it was slowly turning me into the monster everyone thought I was.”

“You were never a monster.” Conviction bled into her tone, but she hadn’t been on my father’s missions.