A shiver runs through me, and I wrap my arms around myself, thinking it might steady me. But it doesn’t.
I can’t look at him when I speak next, as though I’m betraying us both. “Am I even myself? Am I real at all?”
“Clara—”
“You said the World remakes people, too. What if I was somehow remade for you?”
“Clara.” My name is firmer.
“Or what if your obsession with this ‘destiny’ is what brought us together?” I look back to him, eyes stinging, every rib in knots. “Do I…” I can’t bring myself to saylove.Not when my feelings hardly feel like my own. “Do I care for you at all? Or am I simply possessed to? Told by fate? Is any choice really my own?”
“Clara, stop.” His hands land on my shoulders, and Kaelis ducks slightly to look me right in the eyes. “These questions are ones that the sages and prophets and so-called holy seers have been asking of the tarot for years. Maybe all we are is our destiny. Or maybe we mold destiny to our will with every shuffle of the deck. Either way, we’re still us. As long as we breathe, I believe that the truth of who we are is an immutable force.”
“What truth is that?” I laugh, hollow and haunted. “I’ve spent my entire life hating you—thinking you were the bane of my existence. All because the Chalice deemed it so? Because it removed the pathwhere you and I met and fell in love? Did it make me loathe you so I wouldn’t love you? What choice did we really have?”
His silence is deafening, as heavy as the visions in the forefront of my mind. For a moment, I think he might release me in frustration or disappointment. But he only holds me tighter, hands quivering as if actively fighting to refrain from pulling me to him.
“I have asked myself the same thing, over and over, but the only path we have is forward. The only guiding light we have is our belief in what we are destined for. And when my doubt is at its greatest, I remember the look on your face when we first met. How defiant you were. The fire in your eyes every time you stood up to me. The way you refused to bend for me that only made me want you all the more. That is undeniable. That isyou.”
I want to believe him. But the longer I think about everything he showed me and all the implications of it, the more I am thrown off-balance. The room is suddenly too small, the air too thick. For the first time, I think that maybe the power of the World isn’t meant for mortal hands. It all seems like too much.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner?”
“Would you have believed me?” We both know the answer to that. “Would you have allowed me to show you?” Also an obvious answer. “I told you the truth—as much as I was able and thought you could handle, that wouldn’t push you further from me—from the very beginning. I told you my intention for the World and the wish I would make. Which was never a lie. I want to make things better for us all, and the only way I can do that is by reclaiming the future that was stolen from me. Fromus.” A pause. A breath slowly sucked in through quivering lips. “But I cannot be the one to make that wish.”
Every muscle in me goes slack when I realize what he’s saying. The second card he sacrificed—the vision of him getting the World and making the wish: He destroyed that future.
“You can’t be serious,” I breathe.
“You.” The single word has desperation and hope wrapped within it. The way he looks at me is as thoughIam the World. “It must beyou, Clara. My father has never been afraid of me handling the golden cards, of my ambitions for the throne, because he thinks that I am helpless to change my fate. I know what I gave up in my bones, and I told him as much. Butyoucan still make the wish.”
I can’t stop myself from laughing. Kaelis leans away, brow furrowing.
“All this time…I’ve been plotting, and scheming, and planning. I’ve been calculating alternatives and thinking of what I might need to do—just in case you are not the man I thought you were. I was unsure if I could ever bear to put the World in your hands. Debating if I wanted to take it for myself. And for what?”
“Fate has quite the sense of humor.” He wears a wry smile, but it is twinged with pain at the confession. Though there is an understanding in his eyes. I haven’t hidden, at any moment, the doubt I felt in him.
“So what do you want from me? To make your wish for you? To turn myself back into the version of me you saw in your previous futures?”
He shakes his head, hands relaxing their grip on my shoulders. One trails down my arm while the other rises to my cheek. He brushes his knuckles gently over my skin, leaving a warm flush in their wake. Kaelis’s expression softens into something mournful.
“I wish I could say yes,” he whispers. “Because it is what a part of me wants, more than anything. But to say yes would be to deny everything I love about you. Your tenacity. Your rebellious spirit. All I want for you, Clara, is to have a choice. The one the Chalice denied me but that is still within your reach. The choice to be whomever you want—to make whatever future you desire. All I hope is that when you make that choice, it is the best one you can, with all the information possible. And, selfishly, that I might still find a place at your side in that future.”
For a moment, the anger falters. The choice—theopportunityto build my own future is something I’ve been chasing my whole life but that has always been just beyond my grasp. Every step I’ve taken, everydecision made, has been shaped by forces beyond me. Forces as inexorable as the rising of the sun or the changing of the moon.
“If you believe one thing, believe this: It has never been about me, Clara; this has always been about you.”
My breath catches in my throat, and I nearly choke on everything I want to say. Everything I can’t say. Something inside me snaps, almost audibly, and I finally break. Every wall shatters. Everything I’ve ever denied, or pretended didn’t exist, is gone. I close the distance between us in a blur, take his face with both hands, and pull it toward me.
Kaelis tenses initially in surprise under my touch. I’m not sure if he even has time to close his eyes before our mouths meet. But he recovers quickly, one arm wrapping around my waist, the other bracing between my shoulder blades and reaching up into my hair. He clutches me to him with breathless desperation.
The kiss is a confession and a question. An admission and a denial. Our bodies were made to fit together, mouths made like puzzle pieces, tongues made to dance. It is raw. It isreal.It is fragile and yet stronger than the pull of the moon on the tides.
When I finally break away, he sucks in a shuddering breath. Kaelis stares, eyes filled with something I’m too afraid to name.
Chapter 54
My hands ball in his shirt and I pull him toward me again. Our gazes are locked as we take every step, turning. A predatory gleam shines in his gaze, one I respond to in kind.
