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Ask him about the last page,her mind begged.Ask him what it meant!
“I’ll leave it under the roots of that tree over there,” she told him, pointing to a large oak. “I’ll mark it with something. You can fetch it in a hundred years if I fail tomorrow. If… if you still want to.”
“I’ll always want to, Jules. That’s the problem. I’ll always wantyou.”
“How can you say that? How can that possibly be true?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it is. I have spoken of it often enough in shadows. I want you. I always will. I—”
His words drifted away as he claimed her mouth with his, or perhaps they never existed in the first place. Her thoughts spiralled beneath his lips, drunk and dizzying. How was she supposed to return to normal after this, to be with someone—anyone—else?
She ought to hate him for this, or hate herself, hate how her body was betraying her to emotion.
But she didn’t, she couldn’t.
She refused to let the sorrow of tomorrow slay this moment.
Perhaps it is the future I want to vanquish, not him, not us. Perhaps impossibility itself. He was never my enemy. Never could be.
She kissed him harder at the thought, hands grasping at him again, dragging her mouth to his neck, his breath against her ear, gasping into them. He pulled her back to him, hands sinking into her hair. He drank her like wine, soft and savouring.
When his eyes met hers, they were wide and wonderful.“I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could convince you to break our deal and run away, is there?”
Juliana froze. How could he go from confessing his feelings to asking her to abandon him? “What, leave you to rot and damn a kingdom?”
“Yes.”
Juliana pulled away. “Why would you want me to do that?”
“The kingdom will be fine, eventually, according to Ladrien’s curse. We won’t die. But if you go there tomorrow… you might.”
Juliana stilled, uncertain, shocked by his words. If Faerie remained sleeping, the realm would not be theirs when they woke. Ladrien would take it and twist it into something else, a land of shadows and thorns. “I’m not worth a kingdom, Hawthorn.”
“You are to me.”
Juliana buckled. He’d said helikedher. It was all right to like each other, to indulge… but saying something like that…
It was dangerous, deadly. They couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
Hawthorn sighed, turning up to face the skies. “You look surprised, yet you read my words, my desperate attempts to work out which was the lie, and learn what wasn’t. I suppose I’ve done a rather good job, this past year, of hiding how I feel for you. It’s been a wretched kind of agony, I’ll have you know. But I’d promised you knighthood, and I didn’t want to make things too awkward or unbearable for you to stay. And, selfishly, Iwantedyou to stay. As awful as it was to be beside you, the idea of you leaving was far, far worse.”
A pause thumped around the glade, loud as a heartbeat, soft as thunder.
“I love you, Jules, in case that wasn’t clear. I fear I may always love you.”
She would have been less shocked if he’d struck her with lightning. It wasn’t that he felt that way, because really, deep down, she ought to have known.Didknow. But that he’d said them—said the words that could never be taken back—
It was all right to sleep together, to want each other.
But they weren’t allowed to love.
But you do love him,a voice reminded her.You have for a long while.
She could not pin it on a moment, could not trace that river back to its source. It was a thousand raindrops, a storm. A tempest of days spread out over years.
Say something,her mind whispered, or perhaps it was him, desperate for a response that wasn’t coming.
She couldn’t speak.
