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“Of loving me?”

“Are you insane?” I propped myself up on an elbow so fast his pupils widened in the firelight. “Loving you was never the problem, Aren, and if you’d heard me—truly heard me—you never would’ve grappled with that.” I tracked the bob of his Adam’s apple and reached out to cup his jaw as his eyes fell. For only the second time since I’d known him, the man looked… small.

Right there—in the slump of his shoulders, the harsh set of his stubbled jaw—I saw it. Like staring into a shattered mirror, the pieces painted an image so nonsensical my heart throbbed in protest. Every moment I’d spent feeling unworthy of this man seemed reflected back at me in his downcast eyes and the tightness in his face.

The peacekeeper who wielded the world’s most feared blade had convinced himself I was afraid… of loving him.

My voice softened as I admitted, “I was scared, and the idea that one move from me could have you… removed from your destiny—removed from your souls—it felt like dying. Now, answer my question.”

Aren’s winter blues softened incrementally, one corner of his mouth lifting. “I’ve always loved that about you.”

Confused, I breathed, “What?”

“Your demand for truth. It’s one of the things I admire most—that steel spine of yours.”

“Then… why didn’t you tell me?” The words sounded more confession than question, as if months of agony had been bottled inside the one thing I’d been too terrified to ask. “You could’ve given me a chance—a moment to think, to process—you know me, Aren. You know the way I⁠—”

His lips crushed the words from my mouth, the familiar heady flavor of him wiping the frustration from my mind as heat burst to life between us.

“I know,” he finally breathed, wrapping me up in his arms and tugging me onto him, our bodies flush as we both studied each other. My breath caught as his fingers traced adoringly across my forehead, my cheek, tucking my hair behind my ear. As if he was memorizing me just as I was scouring over him. “I know, and I’m sorry,” he breathed, laying back to study me as he ran his fingers through my hair. “I thought I knew my place in the world, Mags. Was pretty fucking certain of it, actually. But… then along came this beautiful little healer—the only Hazelharborian to stand her ground and make it perfectly clear that my reputation meant jack shit when it came to her sisters—who flipped everything I’ve ever known on its axis. And in a matter of weeks, it was as though you started systematically cutting ties to everything I thought mattered for centuries. My home. My hierarchy. My… duty. Honor. It all grew pale. As though all the color in my life had concentrated into… you. Your laugh. Your jabs. Your… disapproval, if I’m honest. But you… had someone.”

When he pursed his lips, pain pinched between his brows, and my soul writhed with the need to smooth it away.

Instead, I whispered, “It wasn’t like that.”

“But you had someone,” he repeated, those hard blues going distant as though he’d walked back to the beginning. “Heredis ‘arrangement’ or not. And then I had a terrifying realization: I would happily take whatever fraction of your life you’d allow me.”

“Aren,” I breathed, his name an aching reprimand.

“No. I mean it. I would’ve been whatever you needed me to be—friend, coach, confidant, the gravedigger for some idiot your shadows suffocated because they hurt one of your sisters.” My watery chuckle brought the faintest smile to those mesmerizing lips, and he ran his palm over my hair again—smoothing it or clinging to me, I wasn’t sure. “No matter how much it carved my heart out to hear his name on your tongue so casually, always with some combination of reverence and affection, I decided I would take whatever you gave me and be grateful for it. As my… suspicions grew… I knew it wouldn’t matter what you asked of me. The answer would be yes. But then… you loved me back.”

“Love,” I corrected softly. He smiled, but it was so timid there wasn’t a hint of that dimple as he ran his hand over my hair again.

“And I thought that in time, you’d come to recognize what we were on your own. That I’d earn your trust, your love, and when you were ready to make that decision for yourself, you’d accept the Bond without feeling like that choice had been made for you. After whatever you had with Bellamy⁠—”

“It wasn’t like that,” I repeated.

“But wasn’t it?” he challenged without condemnation, merely stating the facts. “The man saved your life time and again and, as far as you knew, moved in with you and Blythe to protect you both. You can’t tell me you didn’t love him. Maybe not in the same way, but a powerful soul doesn’t tether themselves to another with blood magic without love or power being a factor.”

Had I… loved Bellamy? Maybe. In some sense of the word. In the way I loved Blythe, only… fuck me, it was deeper. I’d trusted him. With pieces of me no one else saw. With my body after…

Aren seemed to see the confirmation cross my face because he nodded solemnly. “Between his lingering presence in your life and The Six breathing down your throat about The Heredis, I couldn’t stand the idea of being one more obligatory thing—one more aspect of your life fate determined without your consent. You were my everything. Are my everything. But I needed you to choose that for yourself.”

“What about the Heredis?”

“What about it?”

“Alec… well, I found out on the equinox. What was the plan, Aren? You can’t convince me the greatest tactician of the millennia ran out of time.”

“The plan was to kick my coven out of my house and make love to you until the ceremony marked you as Heiress.”

I searched his eyes as mine burned, finding them disarmingly earnest. “And what about the Guardian Bond?”

“What about it?”

“You could never bind yourself to me—to anyone—in a way that compromised Grayshell.”

Pain flickered in his eyes even as a sheepish smile slanted his mouth, one shoulder lifting. “You never asked.”