AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He captures one of my pawns, and I bite back a curse. He was distracting me, and I let him. I take several deep breaths before my next move, studying the board with what I hope is a clear head.
“How is Sigrid?” I ask more because I genuinely want to know than as a diversion. I don’t need to resort to cheap tricks to beat him.
“Why do you still pretend to care about someone when you were willing to abscond with their only cure?” There’s something forced in his biting tone, like he can’t quite muster up the energy to fully hate me today.
I make a move to begin laying my trap before I answer.
“I’m not pretending,” I say in the calmest voice I can manage.
“You’re definitely pretending.” There’s nothing false in his acerbity now. “I just can’t quite work out how.”
I heave a heavy sigh through my nostrils but don’t answer. We play in silence for a few more minutes before he speaks again.
“If you care, why were you so happy to take her antidote and die rather than find another way?”
Whatever bit of calm I have been clinging to effectively evaporates with those words.
“I was nothappyto do anything,” I snap. “And therewasno other way. I do care about Sigrid, but she is not the only one I care about, so I made a judgment call that would harm the least number of people.” Even in my fury, I don’t release the full truth.
That I hadn’t been willing to die for my plan or even for his subjects, though I do care about them. I’m not like him. I don’t see the greater good so much as the precious few people I give a damn about.
I was willing to die for my sisters. And I was willing to die forhim.
He narrows his eyes at me like he wants to argue, and I slide my rook into place with more force than is strictly necessary. “Checkmate.”
He studies the board with parted lips, and I allow myself a small moment of satisfaction. Until he ruins it by opening his mouth again.
“Killing yourself, widowing me, and risking the only antidote for an entire castle’s worth of people was the least amount of harm you could do?” His eyes are wide with disbelief as he returns to the conversation I would just as soon have abandoned.
“Yes, it was.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“My reasons are hardly --”
“Don’t you dare say relevant!” he booms.
I say it anyway. “Relevant.”
He clenches and unclenches his massive fists, his eyes burning like the dragon’s breath right before it nearly killed me. But I don’t look away.
“Don’t I get a say in what’srelevant?” he grits out.
“No,” I answer. “You don’t.”
“Of course not. Because that would involve you actually consulting someone other than yourself. Did it occur to you, Zaina, that maybe there was another option you weren’t seeing? No. And why would it, when you could never bring yourself to admit you’re not always the smartest person in the room.”
I am momentarily speechless, because the truth is, that didn’t occur to me. It still doesn't because I would never put my sisters’ safety in another person’s hands. Whatever he sees on my face, he shakes his head.
“Still keeping secrets, even now. What good could they possibly do you at this point?”
“It was never about me,” I seethe quietly.
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t about me,” he shoots back. “Since you were perfectly content to let me spend the rest of my life wondering why my wife betrayed me and why she would actually ratherdiethan be honest with me.”
I shake my head bitterly. In the six weeks he refused to so much as speak to me, my time had been running out. Maybe I never would have confided in him, but he had removed all possibility by shutting me out of his life entirely.
Weeks of pent-up frustration and keeping my silence at his never-ending onslaught of accusation catch up to me in this single extended moment. “Let’s not pretend you ever treated me like a wife, Einar, when most of the time you forgot I existed at all, despite the fact that you were the one who wanted me here.”
