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Then she set it on the expanse of the desk between them tenderly, as if it was a bomb.
“Is that...?” But his pulse was going crazy in his veins. And he was staring at her as if she was a ghost, or the sun, or some beautiful, complicated combination of both. “Calista. You didn’t.”
“I made my choice,” she whispered, her voice thick. “The board voted to remove him, but in the end, I knew my place wasn’t there. It’s here. With you.”
And then, her eyes really did fill with tears.
More astonishing, she did nothing to hide them.
Orion had no memory of moving. But he was around his desk, with his hands on her, before his next breath was through.
“I want to be the woman you thought I was when you told me you could trust me,” she cried, her head back and her face...open. Tears in her eyes and nothing but stark honesty stamped across her features.
And in all his life, Orion had never been so humbled.
“I want the future,” she told him, her voice broken. “I want a future with you. I’ve spent my whole life battling the past, and it’s done nothing but make me sick and slimy, just like him.”
“Never,” he growled.
“I want those weeks we shared to become our life,” she continued, as if it scared her. But she kept going. “And I want you to know, Orion, that betraying you almost killed me. Because none of what happened between us was anything to me but sacred. And the thought that I destroyed it, forever, breaks my heart.”
She pulled in a ragged breath that sounded like a sob. “So I’ve proved it to you the only way I could. By setting you free.”
“Calista.” He pulled her closer to him, holding her tightly, the way he wanted. The way he always wanted—he, who had taught himself not to want at all, until her. “I’ve already told you. You cannot shame me with the truth.”
“I’m not ashamed of your truths,” she sobbed. “I’m ashamed ofme. I’m ashamed that it took me right up to the eleventh hour to understand what I was becoming.”
“You were fighting fire with fire,” he said, surging to her defense without stopping to think about it. The way he always would. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You found another way.” Her hands were braced against his chest and the way she looked at him made him feel like a god, not a king. “You always find another way. You never sink to anyone’s level, you make your own.”
“Of course I do,” he said, and allowed himself a small hint of a smile. “I am the king.”
“I only hope that you will help my sister in the way I tried to do, but couldn’t,” she whispered.
He pulled out his mobile and shot off a text to the head of his security. “She will be removed from your family’s home within the hour and installed in the palace. Will that do?”
“Orion.” And the way she said his name was like an ache. “I didn’t come here to tell you that I was calling off our wedding. I came to give you those pictures, so that part would be ended. And with the full understanding that once my father’s leverage over you was gone, you might be perfectly happy to see the back of me. I accept that.”
Though he noted, with some satisfaction, that she sounded wretched. Not accepting.
“If you wish to leave me at the altar, Calista, you will have to do it yourself,” he growled at her. “I will be there tomorrow in the Grand Cathedral, ready and waiting to make you my queen. All you need to do is show up. Or not.”
She pushed against him, shaking her head. “You can do so much better than me. You could have anyone. Why would you want the daughter—”
“I don’t care who your father is,” he told her, his face low, and his mouth against hers, like a vow. “I don’t care who my father is, either. It’s time for us to bury them, Calista. You and me, together. We will put them in the ground, one way or another, and we will find our way into our own future. A future that has nothing to do with either one of them.”
She gazed up at him, looking caught somewhere between despair and hope, and so he kissed her.
Because words were only words, but this—
This was real.
This was them.
It had already changed both of them. So deeply that Orion doubted either one of them could ever go back to who they’d been before.
Good, a voice in him said. Smugly.
