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She was genuinely asking him these questions. As if her life depended on it—but she wasn’t desperate. Not the way he remembered being when his life had been on the line. Too many times.
Not Amalia. She was showing him her softness. Her hope. With no apparent care for her own safety here.
He had never seen anything so reckless.
Joaquin pushed back from the table and stood up, in a rush. As if he intended to do...something, but what was there to do? Flip his own table? Demand that she love him more than the palace that had expelled her when he had expressly forbidden it?
Order her to protect herself better? When he had just bemoaned her armor?
“You’ve been here for weeks,” he threw at her instead. “Weeks.Do you really believe that is a privilege I grant to just anyone?”
“I know you don’t,” she replied, and he could see the torment in her gaze from across the table. He could feel inside his own chest, as if he was the one doing this to the both of them. “But then, this is my punishment, isn’t it? This is what you wanted all along. To make me pay. To keep me close, as close to tethered to you as possible, while you give me nothing in return. So how should I reach you, Joaquin? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
It would have been different if she’d thrown that at him in anger, clearly trying to hurt him. If she’d been fighting here. But she was only looking at him, her face vulnerable. Her gaze direct, and still too soft for his liking.
She was killing him.
“I have given you everything I know how to give,” he hurled back at her.
And then felt as if she’d gut-punched him again, because that was a truth he had not so much as thought. Much less said out loud.
He had spent all these weeks focused on her. On watching her wither away before him. When perhaps the real issue had been him all along, because what she wanted from him he couldn’t give. He didn’t have it in him. He had been forged by harsh, cruel implements and what she was asking for was a kind of softness that wasn’t in him.
It had all been taken from him, long ago.
“It isn’t in me,” he told her, though his voice was thick. “These things you want, I do not have them.”
He saw sheer misery wash over her then, though she didn’t look away. If anything, she sat straighter. Her blue eyes glittered, and he wanted to tell himself those weren’t tears—but he knew better.
She waskillinghim.
“Do you love me, Joaquin?” she asked him.
It was as if the world stopped.
He felt it jolt and shudder.
And then, in the wake of that, everything seemed to buckle, crack, fall apart.
Hebuckled. He cracked. He fell apart—and yet he still stood there with the Thames behind him, the blue in her gaze all he could see.
How dare she ask him such a thing?
“I already loved you once, Amalia,” he managed to grit out. “It was more than enough.”
Amalia stood, then. And held herself so still, so precisely, that she reminded him of nothing so much as a blade. Even though he understood, on some level, that it was not in her nature to cut him.
Perhaps that only made it worse.
“You only love me in retrospect, Joaquin,” she said, and she was not yelling. She did not sound cold or distant. She spoke quietly.Softly, damn her, and he would have preferred violence. Shattering glass, broken crockery. Proof that he was not the only one so blackened and hollowed out inside. “Only to justify your fury that I dared live up to the responsibilities I had before I met you. Only when it served you did you love me. Only when you could use it as one more weapon against me.”
He wanted to shout, but managed to keep from it. He would never know how. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Not because she was wrong. But because the way he had loved her before seemed like a daydream to him now. Because what he felt for her was not a summer, so quickly gone. It was an ocean. Challenging. Deep.
Eternal, something in him whispered, but he couldn’t allow himself to catch hold of that.
“But I do.” She spread her hands out before her, but he did not mistake this for a surrender. “I keep coming back to you, don’t I? I keep trying. I keep thinking I can love you enough that it won’t matter how you feel in return. I keep telling myself that if I manage to love you in the right way, it will make you feel the same. It will show you the way. But it won’t. All it does is hurt.”
