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Her face blanches, and she flinches like I’ve just struck her. “What? No!”
“Hanna,” I say, my voice low with conviction. “This is your world. You entered a marriage bargain with me in exchange for your father’s life. I don’t want to hold you to me anymore. I don’t want to be that burden.”
Her mouth drops open for a moment as she sits up. “Tuoni, please. I just told you I love you.”
“I know you love me?—”
“You don’t know!” she cries out. “And you don’t…” She trails off and shakes her head, holding the sheets over her naked breasts. “No. I am with you because I choose to be.”
“I don’t understand why you would choose this. I look around, and I see your world. I see all the things you’ve had to give up. Don’t you see the things you gave up because I captured you, because I forced you into marriage? I made you become a queen; it wasn’t your choice.”
“But I like being a queen now,” she says adamantly. “I think I might even be good at it. I’m the chosen one, for god’s sake.”
“Not the sake of this god,” I tell her. “You had a life before me. I didn’t let myself think about it, but now, I see it. I see it when you look at your phone, at your mother and your father and your friends. Your old city, your old job. Before you met me, you would have had plans and dreams. You would haveimagined meeting a nice man, getting married to him, having his children, living in a nice house by the ocean. Those were your dreams.”
She looks away. “You know nothing of my dreams.”
“I know that you had ideas of how your life might have gone, and then I took that all away from you. I took you from your home, your world, and I bent you and shaped you until you fit into mine. I can’t…” I take a deep breath, my heart pounding. “I can’t live with myself if I know I’ve prevented you from living the life you should be living. I can’t afford to be so fucking selfish all the time.”
She’s quiet, looking down at her hands, and deep in the darkest parts of me, I fear I struck a nerve, that maybe she didn’t think that way before, but now she’s thinking it. Feeling it. Considering it.
Oh fuck, what have I done?
I want nothing more than to take back those words. Perhaps I could use my mind control on her too.
“Is that what you want?” she asks quietly.
“Me? No,” I tell her. “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want to lose you. If I lose you, I lose everything.”
“Because of the prophecy,” she says with a slow nod.
“No,” I say, reaching out and putting my hand at her cheek, forcing her damp eyes to meet mine. “I lose everything becauseyou’remy everything.”
Her mouth quivers, and she blinks at me, a tear spilling down her cheek.
“Fuck, the last thing I ever want is to make you cry,” I say to her, wiping the cheek away with my thumb, reveling at the feel of it against my bare skin. “But you’re so damn beautiful when you do.”
I exhale heavily, my heart still heavy. “Listen, Hanna, my queen. You will never stop being my queen, nor will you stopbeing my prophecy, but I no longer wish to keep you bound to me. I want to let you go so you can be free to fly, to be that little bird you are.”
She places her fingers around my hand and holds me like that. “And I appreciate that you’re giving me that chance, but I’m not taking it. Because I don’t want to. Because I love you. My plans for my life? All I wanted was to find my purpose and find someone to love and, with you, I’ve found that. No matter how you try to spin it, there is no way I can just move on with whatever life I have left in this world knowing that my mother is the Goddess of the Sun, knowing that the balance of the afterlife rests in me uniting the land, that my heart truly belongs to yours. It’s too late for me now. I’m with you until the bitter end, Tuoni.”
Fuck. NowIfeel a wet burning sensation behind my eyes. Damn these mortal emotions. “You have no idea how much I’ve needed to hear that. To know that.”
“Well, I’m glad I’ve made you see otherwise,” she says. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
“I would never try to get rid of you.”
But as I lay back down beside her and hear her slowly drift off to sleep, my mind starts to plan. It starts to race.
I don’t want to let Hanna go. I selfishly want her at my side as my lover, my wife, my queen, for all of eternity. But I don’t know what the future holds, and I don’t know what her part in the prophecy is. They said the one who can touch Death is the one to unite the land, but there has to be a way for her to do that without coming into danger. I know we were lucky in Inmost, but when we step back in Tuonela, if it’s already descended intoKaaos, I’m not sure how much luck we’ll have left. I want to keep her safe. I want to keep her alive.
I need to figure out a way to do that.
Chapter 16
Tuonen
The Dungeon
