"It's a fucking tragedy that you sleep at the Shadow Camp, twenty minutes down the road, when you could be here. You get up early and go to work anyway. You're not abandoning your people."
"You have a deal, if I get to choose our dinner every night."
"And I get to choose the wine?" That one is a dealbreaker.
She laughs, wrapping herself around me and kissing my shoulder. "Deal. Have you forgotten about what I did with the chains? You forgave me very quickly.”
"I haven’t, and I will repay you in due course. I trust you haven't either?"
"Rexxan, I wouldn't forget it. I’ve genuinely fingered myself to the thought—“
"Stop fucking talking." This woman is a headache personified, but I love that about her. But my sinful plans to take her to my downstairs bedroom are torn to shreds when Stellan arrives and announces he is holding victory drinks with all the hunters, and Renna decides that a party is just what I need.
I am eight hundred years old. A party is not what I need.
* * *
"This is absolute madness,"says Lynna, standing beside me with a mortified expression that I imagine is mirrored on my own face too. Renna, Anna, Onyx, and Stellan are drunk out of their minds, performing some kind of Mountain Kingdom dance on a table at their campsite. The crowd cheers them on. "Yet you cannot help but love them all."
"I want her to be mine," I say, not meaning to voice it aloud.
"Long term?"
"As long as I'm alive."
Lynna smiles, tears in her eyes. "I've waited so long to see you happy, Rexxan."
"Pull yourself together." I hate emotional people.
She laughs, wiping her eyes. "I'm just happy for you, Rex. I don't think Renna realises how unhappy you were before her. I don't thinkyourealise how unhappy you were."
"I wasn't unhappy."
"Rexxan," she whispers, leaning her head on my shoulder. "You sedated yourself every night. Gods, Rex, I found you on top of a cliff more than once."
"Rexxan!"Lynna screams, over the lashing rain, thunder, and lightning that pummels the pitch-black night. I don’t turn back, just stare at the raging river at the bottom of the cliff. Another bolt of lightning illuminates the water. I am in the eye of the storm.
No, Iamthe eye of the storm.
"Rexxan, please!" She shouts over the thunder, her arms wrapped around herself as I teeter on the edge of the seventy-foot drop. I allow myself to look back at her. Golden-white hair is plastered to her face as she shivers violently, begging me not to jump. She goes to take a step towards me and I summon everything I have to make a bolt of lightning strike the ground beneath us. She sobs into her hands. "Please don't."
"Go home," I say, standing at the edge, torn between my desperation to die and my love for my young son. "I said go home!" I yell, forming another bolt of lightning that sizzles the ground between us. She screams, stumbling back.
"Stop it!"
I look down at the water. Do I? Don't I? Hot tears run down my ice-cold face. I'm alone, in a job I don't want for the rest of my life, with a young son who I can't make happy, and burns that make me scream all night. I can't leave the house without a crowd gathering around me and asking me how I'm coping with the loss of my entire family.
I take one final step forward, my toes over the edge, and Lynna's scream pierces the air. Her soft voice carries on the wind, an ancient language used by the gods flowing out of her mouth like poetry.
I look around me as pale pink flowers blossom all over the grass, and vines and flowers crawl over my feet until I am rooted to the ground. It’s a battle between the powers of the gods, the sky against the earth. She doesn’t stop until the entire cliff's edge is lined with pink daisies.
"There's beauty in the world, Rexxan. You can't see it now, but you'll see it one day. You'll realise one day," she whispers, taking a step towards me, her dress soaked through. As if I am made of glass, she turns me round, vines holding me back from the edge,and sobs into my chest, wrapping two arms around me until I am crying too, utterly broken.
I shudderat the memory from a time in my past. Is Renna the beauty in my world? Perhaps she is.
"I'd never have done it. I couldn't do it." To force my son into being King when I know how much he'd hate it would've been unforgivable. I let out a long sigh. "The books and the stories you read...the whole time, it's about the characters not realising they're in love. Then they do finally admit their love for each other, and it's happily ever after. It doesn't fucking work like that. So what, we tell each other how we feel? It doesn't change anything, Lynna. I'm still a King who can't marry an assassin and she's still an assassin who has no desire to be Queen."
"You don't know that about her, Rex."
