Page 33 of King's Heir of Hate

Esme didn’t think through what she was doing. Because she knew she was going to do it anyway, whether she thought it through or not. She turned back toward the water and then took off running down what was left of the dock, those last few feet.

Then she launched herself into the air and hit the water, plummeting down beneath the surface of the lake.

And sank.

Chapter Nine

FOR A MOMENT,Tadeo froze in place. In utter disbelief.

There were ripples on the surface of the lake and it was almost as if he was dreaming this, or had imagined it, or—

But in the next second, he was moving. He charged down the dock, threw himself into the air, and dived into this lake he had swum in and boated on the whole of his life. Never had he had the slightest moment of concern about these waters.

Yet everything was different now that Esme had sunk straight down and hadn’t come up.

He dived deep, but there was no sign of her. And when he shot back up to the surface for a screaming sort of breath into his aching lungs, something icy and cold gripping him like a terrible fist in his chest—

But he stopped.

Because Esme was there. Floating quite happily and paddling along on the surface of the lake. He could feel his own heart like a drum. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. There was a literal red haze descending upon him, but he blinked it away.

“But you said—”

Tadeo was so furious he couldn’t finish.

“I swim like a fish,” Esme told him merrily. “See? You don’t know me at all. As I have said.”

“I thought—” But he stopped himself again, because he refused to tell her that he’d thought she was drowning. That felt like a bridge too far.

You are already in the water, fully clothed, a voice inside reminded him.Who cares about bridges at this point?

Still, he said nothing. If he told her she’d scared him… Well. He presumed that had been the point of this exercise and he did not wish to give her the satisfaction of telling her it had been successful.

“I want more,” she told him, treading water in all her clothes. Her hair was now plastered to her head, but those luminous eyes of hers were fastened to his. “I don’t want rules. I want a marriage. I want our son to grow up and know that he is loved.”

“Our son will be the King of Bellaza when I am dead. He will grow up knowing this. He will understand his responsibilities—”

“He will grow up knowing that he is loved,” Esme said again, with a certain steel in her voice. “Do you hear me? Better yet, do you hear yourself? Do you think that perhaps some of the challenges you faced in your childhood were due to the fact that you weren’t allowed to be a child? Too concerned with responsibilities and your father’s death?”

“I’m not listening to this,” he growled at her. He swam to the dock and pulled himself up out of the water, then glared balefully back toward the lake. Where his queen made absolutely no move to follow him. Esme was floating on her back with her arms thrown above her head and her belly poking above the waterline, looking as if she could stay there all day. “I’m not going to take lectures on childrearing from a person so unhinged that she would throw herself into a body of water after claiming she couldn’t swim for the express purpose of proving a point.”

“Is that unhinged?” She lifted her feet out of the water and kicked off the singe shoe she was wearing on her right foot. Her left foot was bare. “And what point were you making, exactly, when you hauled me before you in the palace and explained to me how I must remain mute in private, like a good girl, if I wished to earn a place in your bed?”

“That was never—” But he stopped there, too.

“Do you think I don’t know that you set that up so I would fail?” she asked, and though her face was tilted toward the sky, Tadeo felt that question as if she’d stabbed it into his chest like a dagger. “Of course I know.” She moved in the water then, so that she was bobbing there, her solemn gaze on his. “But it didn’t fail, because I’m capable of all kinds of things, Tadeo. What’s a little stretch of quiet? I’ve been in love with you since the moment we met and you’ve been terrified of that, and me, and what we are together for the same length of time. To the point you lied about what you felt. And while I’ve managed to give you pieces of what you want along the way, you’ve never managed to return it, have you?”

He thought then that he had never felt colder in his life. As if he might start shattering.

“If that is true, it would seem that you’ve wasted a decade of your life. You should do something about that.”

“Behold me doing something about it,” she replied.

She swam toward him then and reached up to hold onto the dock, though she made no move to lift herself up or out. It was possible she couldn’t, with her belly, but she also didn’t ask him to help her.

Instead, she looked up at him and made him feel pinned to the dock where he stood.

“Have you ever asked yourself,” she said quietly, those eyes of hers so intense on his, “what you would do if you could live your life on your own terms?”