I wasn’t about to eat all the food, so I corked the bottle and wrapped up the rest. She looked so small as I approached her, her body rigid with tension. Maybe she believed I’d sleep beside her—or try to force myself on her. From the goldenrod her mother had left, I assumed this was supposed to be our wedding night.
Goldenrod. Symbol of good fortune. How ironic. Seren had practically tossed them to the side when she’d climbed onto the bed.
“How old are you?” I asked as I sat on the bedroll.
She stiffened. “Twenty-three.”
For someone so young, she carried herself with the weight of too much lived experience. And a sadness I didn’t understand.
That shouldn’t bother me, but it did.
She cleared her throat. “What about you?”
“Twenty-eight.” I lifted the second pillow. “I’ll sleep on the rug. You have nothing to fear from me. I’m not going to touch you. I promise.” Spending the night on the rug wouldn’t be comfortable, and I’d be cold, but it was close to the stove. Survival was all that mattered.
She watched me skeptically. “You’re such a contradiction. You vacillate between acting with honor and defending Lirien savagery. Which is it? Tell me something true about you.”
“If making the woman who saved my life feel safe is a surprising show of honor, I have serious reservations about the way the Viori conduct their affairs.”
A dimple flashed in her cheek.
That smile was her best feature—not that the others weren’t equally distracting—but I got the feeling that she didn’t smile often.
“Something true?”
She nodded.
Strangely, I wanted to see that smile again. “I’m fairly good at juggling.”
She rolled her eyes. “Something you’d tell your wife.”
“Ah, you want to know about the size of my?—”
“No.” A blush crept on her face.
Now it was my turn to laugh. I hadn’t expected her to be shy. My years in Pendara had desensitized me to sex—not only because soldiers spoke openly about it, but because the lack of privacy in the barracks made modesty impossible.
But I doubted she’d want to know about that. However … “I’d tell my wife that. Show her, too. I believe in good impressions. Though you’ve already seen me naked, so you know for yourself.”
Wariness crossed her features. “This isn’t a joke.”
“Of course it’s not,” I said, straightening. “It’s my life now. Bound to a woman who hates me, surrounded by people who want me dead, and sleeping on a rug. Truly, I’ve never been luckier.”
A smirk crossed my lips and I set the pillow on the rug. A damned blanket would be helpful, but there didn’t appear to be another one. Sinking onto the rug, I sighed, aware of her expectant gaze.
She wanted a reason to trust me tonight.
Maybe even needed it.
As though allowing myself to be beaten wasn’t good enough.
“I’d tell her how my father disowned me for protecting a helpless Ibarran woman that a man had imprisoned in a cage. About how she died in my arms when the man came after me. And how I killed him.”
She didn’t blink, her expression unreadable.
Why am I telling her this?
It was a moment my father had wanted me to feel ashamed of. Yet I couldn’t.
