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I shake myself out of the memory, and something else occurs to me. I had been the one to admit I recognized her last night at the ball, but she clearly knew who I was already.
Though I said I wouldn’t ask her any questions, I can’t seem to help the one that slips out. “Did you know all along—that I was the prince? Was I always the mark?”
She huffs out a bitter breath. “Don’t sell yourself short, Remy. You sold your lie quite well. I had no idea who you were until I got here and your smarmy-arse smirk gave you away.”
I’m almost tempted to smile, but it doesn’t escape my attention that she only answered half of my question.
“And the other?” I push.
Silence settles between us, thick and cloying for several seconds until she breaks it.
“You were a mark.” She pauses long enough for me to think she’s going to stop there. Then she tacks on, “But I wouldn’t say you werethemark. I needed a guard. It could just as easily have been Lawrence, if he had been the one who approached me.”
Something in those words feels false, but maybe that’s just the unreasonable twinge of jealousy I feel at the idea of her taking Lawrence up to her rooms that night. I mull over her response, thinking about it in the context of our relationship.
In the beginning, she had casually asked questions about my schedule and even the prince, but it wouldn’t have been long before it was evident how little information I had to give.Was willing to give.
“Then why stay?” I ask. “You can’t tell me it was a coincidence that The Flame wound up in a—whatever we were in—with the prince.”
She doesn’t answer right away, sinking further into her pillow and angling away from me. When she finally does speak, her voice is quiet and faraway. Exhausted.
“Does it matter? It was obviously a mistake. We were never going to work. Even if you had been just another mark, and I had been just another girl at the bar.”
I’m not sure what makes me admit it. Maybe it’s that in spite of everything she’s done, I feel guilty. Whatever else she is, she’s a girl who has been tortured, imprisoned, threatened, and claimed in less than a day, and I’ve been pushing her for explanations when she has to have hit her limit by now.
Or maybe it’s just that there are plenty of lies between us already.
Whatever the reason, I give her a version of the truth before I can talk myself out of it.
“I might have been just another mark, but you were never just another girl at the bar.”
I would almost think she hadn’t heard me, but her breath cuts off sharply, her head tilting toward me before she turns back to the dying flames.
A hush falls over us once more, but the mutual resentment seems to have dissipated in the wake of something altogether heavier. Maybe it should feel comforting, hearing her wistful tone and knowing that there was a time we both wanted things to be different.
But all it feels is hopeless knowing that she’s right.
We never really had a chance. In that reality or this one.
CHAPTERNINE
AIKA
The next morning finds me both more and less alone than I expected to be.
Remy is still in our bed, but if I thought our bodies would find each other in the night, I would have been dead wrong. He is nearly falling off the mattress in his effort to stay away from me, sleeping on his back as he always does, with one arm hanging off the edge.
His muscled chest rises and falls with each deep, even breath he takes, and I squeeze my eyes closed against the memories it brings to mind. They’re harder to shut out than usual in the wake of my weariness and last night’s conversation.
Images flood my mind of nights we spent keeping each other warm in the drafty room above the bar. My head on his chest. His arm wrapped firmly around me. The way he would wake me up with a kiss to my temple.
But that’s not who we are to each other anymore. We haven’t been for a long time.
Now he’s just my very platonic husband who decidedly hates me.
I suppose I should take comfort in the fact that we’re both still alive, at least.
For now.
