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She was able to consciously consider how to be there for her own daughter.
She was able to put that intention into words and plant them deep inside of her own heart as she held her, saying to her as they lay out on the grass in the estate.
And sometimes she would look up and see Krav, gazing down from the balcony over them.
And she did her best not to look back.
Did her best not to think about him at all.
But it was hard.
She had said that she hated him as much as she had ever loved him, and that was true. It was just that... Sometimes she felt like the hatred existed right alongside the love.
Especially after what he had told her about his past. About his father. His mother.
He had said it with such detachment. It was difficult to understand exactly what he felt about it.
But she had been turning it over inside of herself. Deciding what she felt about it.
And it was an incredibly difficult thing to parse.
So mostly, she chose not to.
But she was marrying him. She was marrying him. That was... Such a strange thing.
She had also been grappling with all of her memories. That was the problem. She had gotten that broken, bad memory back. The truth of what happened when she found out she was pregnant. And she felt utterly silly for having romanticized it now. But she had also gotten back the time they’d had together. And there had been joy in it. And she had seen a lightness in him, and she didn’t think it was a lie.
It was only that... Finding out he was going to be a father had terrified him. She could see that now. That of course he would react to fear with anger. And she could understand that there was fear because of his own past. His own childhood. It made her soften. Which irritated her.
But there was so much more to him than he thought. Than was easy to see.
He’d said he was cold. That his feelings were ghosts, but she’d seen how untrue that was.
His rage was not a ghost. It was a whole dragon.
And if he felt that with such intensity, he must be able to feel everything else.
It was all buried, twisted and mangled beneath the rubble left behind by his childhood. And that made her feel...
She didn’t want to find any sympathy for him. Not any softness. That way lay a certain measure of madness. Because she just wasn’t...immune to him. As much as she wanted to be. And the man was forcing her into marriage...
You could leave. You could fight him.
She pushed that thought away. She wasn’t particularly interested in thinking about the ways in which she was responsible for the situation she found herself in.
It was easy to think only of the way that he had stormed into her life. Easy to think of herself as a lamb being led to slaughter.
She thought of that even as she was wrapped in her white wedding gown the day of the ceremony. Yes, a sacrificial lamb. That’s what she was.
Spotless on the altar before him.
So much drama.
But Riot embraced the drama, as the bouquet of red roses was handed to her.
And she wondered who this farce of a wedding was for. If the doors would swing open and the church would be full of people who were strangers to her.
But the Cathedral was empty. Empty of everyone except for him. The nannies that held Soriya acting as witnesses.
