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I shrug as heat rises in my cheeks. “That’s an exaggeration,” I say.
Aloserin stares at me. “The hell it is,” he says. “You fucked half of the Royal Guard when you lived in the World’s End. Your bed was legendary. It was practically listed in the trekker’s guides.”
Oh, that’s awkward. I twist away and rub my hand over the back of my neck.
Yeah, so there were a few more familiar faces in the Royal Guard than I’d been expecting. Apparently, quite a few of the men and women serving King Galan had been trekkers going through the World’s End at some point. And, yes, I had been known for entertaining the men and women trekking through the World’s End. Intimately. But that was before, and Aloserin knows it.
Aloserin clears his throat, then starts again. “You gave me some advice once,” he says. “It pissed me off, but I come back to it again and again. Every time I get hurt or frustrated, and I start to pull away, I swear on the voids, I hear your damn voice in the back of my head.”
He shakes his head like he’s trying to dislodge that voice. I can’t blame him.
“And now,” Aloserin continues, “I’m going to give that advice back to you.”
I turn toward him despite myself. I remember cooking him breakfast after he drank himself sick and puked about thirty times on the path from the World’s End pub to our house, but I don’t remember ever giving Aloserin any advice. What advice of mine would be worth anything anyway?
Aloserin stares at me with his unnervingly intense, dark eyes. “Talk to her,” he says. “At least you’ll know where you stand. And, if it’s not going to work out, then you can both start to recover.”
I clench my jaw to keep from telling him to fuck the fuck right off, and that memory comes back in painfully intense detail. Yes, that is exactly what I told a brutally hung-over Aloserin that morning over Arryn’s scrambled eggs and my biscuits and bacon.
But, voids damn it, this is different. Aloserin’s situation was crystal clear. He was obviously in love with Ithronel, and he was being a stupid, stubborn idiot. That’s nothing like what happened with me and Alindra.
Rowan’s voice comes back to me like a slap across the face. He said pretty much the same thing over dinner last night, only in more colorful language. He told me Alindra was sad, and I was sad, and I was also being an idiot, and I needed to get the fuck over myself. With a few more curses thrown in for good measure.
“What are you so fucking afraid of?” Rowan asked me last night, just before the conversation devolved into an actual argument.
Because the answer is nothing. I’m not afraid. It’s just that I’m a broken person, and I have nothing to offer a beautiful woman and her child. If I really love Alindra, I’ll let her get on with her life.
Like Shenarah.
Shit.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. The memory of Shenarah just punched me in the gut, and I realize with sudden, sickening clarity that Rowan is right. I am actually afraid of something.
I’m afraid of another no.
Screaming voids below, that’s it. I was fine with taking lovers as long as I was the one to decide things were over and it was time for them to go back to their lives and leave me alone in mine. But once the tables were turned, and Shenarah sided with her family and told me it could never work—
Well, I shut down. I shut it all down, every little spark, every flicker of emotion I felt for the much less frequent visitors to my bed. I told myself my heart was gone, that it was irreparably broken and thrown into the trash heap after Shenarah’s father cast me out of their estate.
And then Alindra burst into my life, a magician whose creations didn’t hurt, a brave, beautiful, brilliant woman strong enough to face down an old god. And I told myself what? That I was too broken for her? Too broken for the woman who took my tiny illusion flower and used it to heal what weeks of torture had done to Rowan’s body?
No. I’m not broken.
I’m afraid.
I walked away from the first woman I felt anything for in decades because I am a massive fucking coward. Because I was so afraid she would change her mind, that she would tell me I was too broken, too ruined, that I wasn’t the kind of man she wanted to be her partner or a father for her child. That I’d have a glimpse of what it would be like to have a family, and then it would be taken away from me, and I’d end up back in the World’s End. Alone.
So here I am. Alone. Not in the World’s End, but in another cold, depressing, lonely little room, one I’ve spent most of my life trying to climb into. Now I’m in the Royal Guard. I should be happy.
But, voids damn it, I’m not. I’ve walled myself off just to make sure the woman I fell in love with wouldn’t have the chance to reject me. I didn’t even tell her why I couldn’t stay with her, why I was afraid that I didn’t have anything to offer the bright and beautiful Worlds Above.
I slip along the stone wall, then sink down onto the edge of my bed. Aloserin makes a polite little coughing sound as his boots scrape on the floor.
“I’ll give you a couple of days,” he says. “Think about it.”
The door to my room creaks open, then closes with a soft little click as Aloserin leaves me alone with the utter ruin of my personal life.
Chapter44
