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Minutes ticked by as I waited for the door to open, for someone to come and tell me something, anything, but the longer I sat, the more I recognized that there was no happy medium to be reached.
What will they say? I can’t return to the palace, not with my dark magic. Saint won’t let me stay here. What will become of me if that’s true?
Was that what they were discussing?
Tears of frustration burned in my eyes, but I didn’t let them fall. The shame wasn’t mine. It didn’t belong to me, and yet both my brother and my lover made me feel as if it did.
I deserve better than this. I shouldn’t have to live like this, explaining myself, hiding myself, moving and shuffling around at the whims of others.
I knew what I wanted, where I wanted to be, but Jace had made it clear that wasn’t going to happen.
Now, my brother would be left with a choice to make, and it made my skin crawl.
He’ll need to marry me off as quickly as possible.
I almost choked on a gasp as I thought it, but I couldn’t think of any other possible outcome. Saint would find the most suitable candidate in the shortest amount of time and marry me off, no matter what I had to say about it. It was the only solution. If he waited too long, the secret of my bloodline was sure to catch fire all through the kingdom, and no one would touch me except the very undesirables that Saint had been trying to protect me from all along.
Slowly, I pushed myself off the mattress and stood, my entire form shaking. My fingers trailed along the familiar walls, another pang of sadness ripping through me.
I would rather die than be married to someone I didn’t love, but Saint wouldn’t understand that, either.
I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused,I told them both quietly, opening the bedroom door.If I had known, I never would have done it, I promise.
“…about this,” Jace was saying.
I closed the door and leaned against it, closing my eyes.
I knew what I had to do.
Chapter 23
Jace
We were getting nowhere with this, and I said as much to Saint.
“Then maybe you should leave,” he suggested coldly. “No one asked you to come here.”
The words pained me to hear, his tone chilling me. He was looking at me like I was a stranger to him when he was the one who had betrayed me.
“Maybe I should,” I growled. “You have some nerve giving me the attitude you are when you’ve been hiding this from me all these years.”
“Me?” he snorted contemptuously. “And I don’t suppose you have anything to apologize for, do you?”
I blinked, amazed that he had found something to blame on me. “Oh, I’m dying to hear how you’re managing to turn this around on me.”
Saint’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward, teeth showing angrily. “You really don’t see what you did wrong, do you?”
Curiosity piqued now, I sat back, draping an ankle over my knee to leer at him. “I’m waiting…”
“You were supposed to protect Elix, not seduce her!” he fired out, each syllable a bullet. My smirk faded, my leg falling down to the ground.
“She told you.”
“Of course she told me,” Saint growled. “I’m her brother!”
“You were supposed to be my brother, too,” I reminded him coldly.
“I thought so, too, Jace, but the older we get, the more you start to remind me of your father.”
