Page 162 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

“No, but from your perspective, if I’m forcing you into this box that you don’t want to be in, and I’m telling myself it’s for your own good—”

“I could have talked to you about this,” he said in a defeated voice. “I made this into this huge thing that we could have cleared up in a five-minute conversation.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I get it. After everything you’ve been through…” I winced. “Sorry. Is that me still putting you in the victim box?”

“Maybe I am still behaving like a victim, though.” He squeezed my hand. “If I’m expecting danger all the time, if I’m always trying to protect myself from it, I’m never free.”

“Well, you are safe, Nikolai.”

He turned to me. “I’m not. It’s not like that. Danger’s always possible. But, you know, so is safety and sweetness and love and trust. And if I spend all my time protecting myself from danger, I miss the opportunities for the good shit. Focusing on the danger makes it so I don’t even see them. It’s actually braver to trust, in a lot of ways, isn’t it?”

My throat tightened. “That was deep, babe. That was fucking insightful.”

He grinned at me.

I grinned back.

Aurelie’s voice, soft. “Now kiss,” she said.

So, we did.

29

corentin

“SO, ANYWAY,” I said, taking a drink of my coffee as I sat on a couch in Aurelie’s bedchamber, “then I said to them that they were already in a better position, because now that the King knows about them, they’re going to be able to broaden their business prospects. I mean, think about it. Who really wants to be able to force someone to present? Not commoners. People in the peerage. Because that means that their families can be part of the royalty. Those people have money to burn. If the Banninos approach them, they can make a lot of money. And I said, now that it’s already out there, it’s going to become gossip amongst the royals. I said that the King will tell people, and they’ll tell people, and that soon members of the peerage will be looking up the Banninos.”

“That’s horrible,” said Aurelie, shaking her head. “What if my family had done something like that to me in the hopes of getting me into the arranged marriage with Dmitri? That’s not a responsible thing, Corentin.”

I shrugged. “Well, they’re off our backs now. They aren’t trying to extort more money from us, and they’re leaving my company alone, so I don’t see that it matters. Anyway, I thought you had something you wanted to talk to me about. That was the reason I had to rush all the way back here from Arenze, right? Let’s talk about that instead of the Banninos. I’m sick of talking about the Banninos. They have been a very boring addition to our story, Aurelie. It feels like they were thrown in to attempt to make things seem dangerous or something, but then, like, nothing has really come of them.”

“Well, not for us, but you’ve assured they’re going to be a problem for all kinds of omegas and alphas in the future,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I should have just kept paying them money? Waiting for them to call you and pretend to have kidnapped someone else?”

“No, I guess we didn’t have a choice, in the end,” she said with a sigh. She checked her phone and then put it back in her pocket.

“You waiting for a call or something?”

“Just checking the time,” she said. “Right about now, Johannes and—”

There was a knock at the door.

“Oh, good,” she said, getting up to answer it. “They’re here.”

Johannes and Nikolai came in together. Their fingers were linked and their scents were all mingled up in a way that made me squirm. I waved at them. “I see you two have made up.”

“I needed them,” said Aurelie. “You guys want to sit down?”

“Sure,” said Johannes. They sat down together, opposite me on another chair. Johannes sat down and Nikolai sat on his lap.

Okay, well, they had definitely made up. I smirked over my coffee.

Aurelie stood up, between us, her hands clasped. “So, I told you all that there’s a strain on my bond with Dmitri?”

“Uh, you kind of mentioned this,” I said. “But I don’t get it. You guys have a life bond. You can’t be disconnected, right?”

“We’re not,” she said. “There is a thread of him still coming through. Right after he shut me out, though, we were completely cut off for probably three hours. It was pretty awful. I’ve gotten really used to feeling him, and he wasn’t there, and I was relieved when at least some of it came back. But not all of it has. And I feel like I need to do something a little bit drastic to fix this.”

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