He cracks a grin. “I figured you’d want a fair fight.”
“Chains or sword, the end’s the same. Me standing over your dead body.”
His grin widens. “So, we’re doing this now?”
“I don’t need you to bleed tonight. Just to talk.”
The Golden Son groans. “I think I would prefer to bleed.”
“Amara,” I say, and that does it.
His whole body tenses. His gaze snaps to mine.
“What about her?” His voice is sharp. “Is she hurt? The baby…?”
“They’re fine.”
His shoulders ease, and he slumps back against the wall. “Then what?”
I hesitate.
The words are hard to find, or maybe it’s just the pride I have to kill to say them. But if I can bleed for Amara, if I can kill for her, then I can damn well humble myself too.
“She won’t speak to me,” I say, flat and honest. “She barely looks at me. I don’t know what I’ve done.”
I pause, jaw tight, breath shallow.
“Tell me the truth.” My voice drops. “Is there something between you? Has she… chosen you?”
The silence that follows crackles. His face is unreadable, maddeningly blank, and the longer he holds it, the more I want to take him up on his earlier offer. Make him bleed.
Just when I’m ready to snap, he speaks.
“No,” the Golden Son says. “She hasn’t chosen me.”
Relief hits so hard my knees nearly give out, but doubt is a stubborn thing.
“How can you be sure?” I ask, hating how desperate I sound.
He dips his head, a slow grin spreading across his face.
“Because in the void, when we were alone in the dark, when she was shaking from pain and that thing reached for her from the shadows, it wasn’t my name she screamed.”
His words soothe something raw in me, like a balm over a wound I hadn’t let myself touch. But there's a gentleness in them too, one he didn’t owe me.
“Then why won’t she fucking look at me?” I mutter, staggering back to lean against a barrel.
He snorts. “For someone who’s lived centuries, you’re dumb as shit.”
I glare, but he’s not done.
“Instead of skulking down here, why not just ask your wife what’s wrong?”
The simplicity stuns me. I search for something, anything, to say.
He raises an eyebrow. “You did think of that, right?”
I jolt upright, squaring my shoulders like an idiot caught off guard.
