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She’d tried to coast on her temper for a while— especially when Vesuvius’s head of security had opened the door and peeked in, then nodded at her as if she was precisely who he’d expected to find when she’d glared back at him—but the truth was, she simply despaired of herself.

There seemed to be nothing she would not forgive him, no matter how she liked to think that she was a creature formed entirely by spite and judgment. And sex with him only muddied the waters. She should have known that by now too.

It was possible that she’d been dreaming her way into the same old fantasies of happy ever afters earlier tonight, because she couldn’t seem to help herself. Because they had been lying in her bed, sleeping with their limbs tangled together, their hearts slowed to the same beat, and their breath as one.

She always had imagined that meant more than it ever had, or could.

“I’m glad that you thought I could not remember anything when you told me the truth about your feelings earlier,” he was saying, urgently. “I needed to hear those things. I needed to let you say them without trying to argue about it. I don’t want to argue with you, Aeryn. Believe me, though it was never my intention to hurt you, I know full well that I did. I can’t take that back.”

“Of course you can’t. I think what I need to ask myself is, what kind of person, after a tortured history like ours, compounds all of that with some more lies the first night we lay eyes on each other in two years?” He started to reply, but she shook her head. “I think I want to consider it a gift, Vesuvius. Because finally, finally, I might actually be able to see you clearly. When we were in Liandero, I could always write it off. It was part of who you were. Part of all the duties and responsibilities you had to carry. But there’s absolutely no reason for any of that here.”

His dark hazel eyes looked like they were on fire, but she could not let herself go to him. She could not permit herself to make him feel better about this. That hadn’t been her job for two long years.

“It is not as easy to walk away from a kingdom as you might imagine,” he told her. “I announced my intention to leave and made the appropriate proclamations, but it will take longer to truly untangle myself from my role as the head of both my family and my country. I wish I could tell you something different.”

“I was just thinking that I was ready to move on.” She crossed over to him, so she could stand right before him and make sure that he could look directly into her eyes and see that she was serious. “I was thinking I might go on a few dates. See what’s out there. Every report I’ve heard from other single women is that it’s dire, but anything has to be better than this endless tragedy. How upset could I possibly get over some guy named Josh or Brandon or Tyler ghosting me when I know what it’s like to be discarded by an actual king?” She laughed at the very idea. “Who can possibly hurt me after you?”

“The only thing I have ever wanted for you is happiness,” Vesuvius told her in that low voice of his that told her she was hitting the target, and hard.

She wished that felt better. But she went with it anyway.

“That sounds very pretty,” she retorted. “But I don’t think it’s true. If it was, you wouldn’t be here now. If what you wanted was my happiness, you would have left me alone to build a life for our daughter without you, the way you insisted I had to do two years ago. Instead, you crash-landed the plane on Lake Michigan and toppled your own reign, and for what?”

“What do you mean, for what?” He was frowning now. “I understand that you’re furious with me. I don’t blame you. But I don’t think that’s all there is between us. I might have remembered more than I let on this evening, but you never lost your memory to begin with. And there were still both of us in your bed. More than once.”

“Yes, congratulations, I’m extremely weak where you’re concerned.”

He made a low sound of frustration. “Or, possibly, there is a light here between us that is never, ever extinguished. No matter how many times both of us wished that it would simply go out, it never has. I do not believe it ever will.”

“There’s no light,” she threw back at him. She didn’t raise her voice, but she didn’t need to. There was something deadlier about this level of quiet. This level of hushed, deep hurt. “The only reason you want me is because you can’t have me. Over and over again, we’ve proven that what you want is the forbidden. Maybe you were too repressed as a child. Maybe you were given too much duty at too young an age. Whatever it is, I represent the life you wish you could lead, but you can’t.”

“What exactly do you think abdication means?” Vesuvius asked her.

“You tell me. Half of your cabinet showed up at my door. That doesn’t sound a whole lot like abdicating a throne to me. It sounds like complicating it and continuing on the way you always have. Endless meetings. Endless claims upon your time. Always and forever, the kingdom comes first.” Her smile was bitter. “You’re the one who told me that.”

And she could see that he remembered the same thing that she did, then. The same moment.

It had been early in that first year. Everything had seemed so fragile, as if the slightest wrong move could shatter everything, and end it before it had really begun. And the last thing Aeryn had wanted was for this magical connection with him to end.

Instead of waiting for her quarterly, prearranged visit to the art gallery, she’d been wildly daring and had come back of her own accord, choosing a long weekend with a national holiday attached on the other end so she had a little bit more travel time.

But despite Vesuvius sounding delighted that she was coming, he had been late to meet her. So late that she’d fallen asleep in her hotel room on a charming, fairy-tale street in Old Town, and had woken up to find him stretching out on the bed beside her.

I thought you weren’t coming, she had whispered, perhaps a little more open and vulnerable than she might otherwise have been because she was half-asleep.

There was a small crisis, he had told her. There was no possibility that I could leave in the middle of it. But I’m here now.

She had reached over to run her fingers down his cheek. I don’t want to be another crisis for you to solve. If that’s what this is, I don’t want to do it.

You are the very opposite of a crisis, he had told her, and then he’d shown her what he meant by that. For a long, long while.

Later, they had lain together on the bed, her face on his chest as he played with her hair.

You make me wish I was someone else, he had said. Aeryn had smiled, her mouth against his skin, but she hadn’t said anything in return. She’d kissed him, then settled her cheek back into place. But that can never be, he had continued, after a moment. No amount of wishing or hoping or dreaming can change the fact of who I am.

She had pillowed her chin on her hands and had gazed up at him. I can’t imagine you being anyone but you, V. Or why you would want to be anyone but you.

His gaze had been so serious. There had been a kind of anguish there, too. Looking back, she wished she could have understood what she’d been seeing. What it meant for the two of them, for their future. How it had all been leading to a delivery room without him.