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She was making vows to him. Becoming his wife. And that was not a temporary state. If she was going to stand there and promise him forever, then perhaps she needed to be prepared to fight for it.
At least give it a try.
A real try, an honest try.
Grappling with the man that he was, and not simply the one she wanted him to be.
Maybe he could change.
Maybe for Soriya it was worth the endeavor.
And maybe for you?
She had not touched him since that night, and now they held hands and faced each other.
“Do you promise to love, honor and obey one another, as long as you both shall live?”
“I will,” he said.
And then the question was posed to her. What did that mean? Had he even paused to consider it? Or was it merely part of his plan to keep her with him? She looked into his dark eyes, and she wished that she could fully understand what it was that he wanted from this. He wanted Soriya to have a mother, but was that all?
What she was realizing about herself, just now, was that there were issues handed to her in childhood that she was aware of, but that did not mean she fully understood the ways that they impacted her life.
And she could see some of them as she looked back on her interactions with Krav.
It was just not as simple as she would like it to be.
And so when she said, “I will,” she did so knowing that she didn’t truly understand what she was saying. Or what it would mean for them. What it would look like. She did so knowing that they had a long road ahead of them, and that she could not let him have the final say in this marriage.
On what it would be.
And when it was time for them to kiss, she made a decision. To go into that kiss. To go into him.
Their mouths met, and her heart nearly burst through her chest. This thing between them had always been so glorious, so wonderful. This was the easy part. This desire. Except it cut her now. Made her feel a deep sense of desire, loss and pain. And of hope. And it was the hope that hurt her most of all. That thing with wings, but she worried that if she flew too high, that in the end, it might abandon her. That it might be part of her destruction.
They were pronounced, man and wife, and they joined hands and walked down the aisle, to their audience of two, and when they had exited the sanctuary, she looked at him.
“Have no fear,” he said. “I have no designs on claiming a wedding night. You are free to spend the rest of the day as you wish. You are my wife, you can go spend my money abroad if you wish.”
“I think I would like to go home. And take care of our daughter.”
“Then you are free to do that if you wish as well.”
“Does cruelty make you feel better?”
He paused. “Are you attempting to score points?”
“No,” she said. “I am simply asking you a question. Does cruelty make you feel better in this instance? Does it make things seem clear to you? Because I understand that we do things in an attempt to make them seem simple. I personally liked to rewrite what I wanted into fate and fairy tales. Because it meant I didn’t have to be responsible for the decisions. So does being cruel absolving you from needing to be better?”
“You think I’m being cruel, but I am just being that which I was made.”
He believed that. She could see it. But she felt in that moment that she knew differently. That she could see the way that he was working to simplify all of this for himself. To justify.
And she didn’t know why he needed it. She just recognized the same thing that she witnessed in her own self. And he left her there, but there was another car to take her back to the estate. They did not go together. He did not seem concerned in the least about appearances of any kind.
Their relationship had already been in the media, and they’d made no announcements about their wedding, so they had drawn no attention for the event.
She wondered if it would’ve been different, had she not remembered.
