Marry Renard or you will never see your love again.
CHAPTER
9
LOVE.
The letter had named him right, though she’d never used that word with him. With Luca. With her love.
But that’s what he was. That was what they’d danced around. What they didn’t dare speak into the atmosphere. It was there—at least for her.
Hanging there between them during their time together, as tangible as their class, titles, and all the other things that gave that word a dangerous weight.
Luca was her love.
The reason—beyond her future and her hopes for Ardenia—that Amarande had spoken out at the funeral. Her feelings for him certainly weren’t a secret. She felt as if they flashed, bare, each and every time she spoke his name. But she’d never acted upon what bloomed in her heart, and somehow she’d felt that would keep him safe from the agendas and desires of everyone else.
Clearly not.
Renard had made a move. Possibly spurred on by his brother, with one well-placed comment in a desperate ear ahead of the funeral. Each had his own desire, threaded through the same path.
Her heart and Luca.
She read the words again. Over and over. Crumbling the parchment more with each pass.
Marry Renard or you will never see your love again.
Marry Renard or you will never see your love again.
Marry Renard or you will never see your love again.
Finally, her fingers failed, the paper drifting to the hay-pocked dirt. It didn’t seem right that the thing was featherlight. Not with all it meant.
Her first instinct was to run after Luca.
To find where he’d gone, who’d taken him, and retrieve him.
To make him safe again with her own hands and skills.
Someone had stolen her father away from this world, and now Luca was stolen, too.
But then she thought of Satordi. Of both the look on his face little more than an hour ago when he said,Don’t be a child,and the sting of his words days ago—You want to be a ruler? Act like it.
The princess Satordi wanted would stay, not follow her impulses into the near dark.
Wouldn’t be impetuous.
That princess would keep a cool head, using her words and diplomacy to avoid war on all sides and ensure no harm to Luca.
But the princess her father taught her to be, while strategic, wouldn’t sit and wait. Wouldn’t suffer through dinner with the boy who stole away her love—would she?
Make the first mark.
Holding Luca for the ransom of Ardenia’s future—her future—was quite the mark to make.
What had King Sendoa done when he found her mother gone? Had he run after her? Or had he retreated to his war room to run it over in his mind? When the Runaway Queen had left, he’d been at the front, ironically protecting Renard’s father from an invasion across the Divide by Eritri. But if he’d been home, he would’ve done something—wouldn’t he? When he returned home, hehaddone something, hadn’t he?
Just as at his grave, with each new question another appeared.
