Page 72 of Power's Fall

“If the other admirals died, I’d be sad. If you died…”

“If I died, you’d help Hungary get a new admiral, but the world would keep turning.”

“Mine wouldn’t.”

That should have been it. They should have declared their feelings for one another, figured out a way they could be together, given their positions, and picked a third.

Instead, Eric had made it clear that though he had feelings for her, she wasn’t worth the risk.

She’d called him a coward for refusing to talk about their relationship, but when she left, he’d sent half the Spartan Guard with her. The Guard spent a week attacking her home, finding every possible weakness, and then helping Grigoris and his team to plug the security holes.

They thought it worked. Though they hadn’t figured out who had put the adder in her bed, they’d figured out how it was done and patched the vulnerability that allowed someone to shut down her security system, including exterior cameras, for ten minutes without anyone realizing.

The last time she saw Eric, six months ago, she hadn’t lied when she told him the improvements had worked and there’d been no further attacks. The attacks hadn’t started until after she saw him.

A warm, floaty feeling rippled over her, and she smiled.

“Feeling good?” Nyx asked.

“I’m not thinking about how my leg was almost chopped off by a bear trap.”

“What are you thinking about?” Nyx peered down at her, clearly curious.

“The last time I saw Eric.” The memory was sharp, like broken glass, but that didn’t stop her from dragging up the replay.

“At the Trinity Council?”

Nikolett stopped breathing. Technically, thatwasthe last time she’d seen him, but she’d been thinking about what happened six months ago.

“No, I was thinking about before.”

Nikolett was a champion compartmentalizer, and the instant she walked out of the library in Dublin, she’d boxed up what had happened and locked it away. If she thought about what he’d done in that meeting, the pain stole her breath, opening wounds deeper and more painful than any assassination attempt would ever be.

Because during the Trinity Council, the fleet admiral hadn’t just chosen Vadisk’s trinity—he’d also chosen Nikolett’s.

She’d known he was planning to use the trinity marriage rule to destroy whatever it was they had. When he summoned her a year ago, she was sure it was to tell her she was being placed in a trinity. She’d taunted him about it, making sure he knew that if he forced her into a trinity, it was because he was scared of what they could have, and how strong their feelings were for one another.

In the year since that confrontation in Triskelion Castle, she’d mostly stopped worrying about him forcing her to marry. After what happened six months ago, she should have gone back to worrying about it. Instead, there had been a series of assassination attempts, investigations, and territory infrastructure projects that occupied her time.

Now he was forcing her to marry, and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it.

Nikolett had a brief reprieve before the actual marriage because one of her new husbands was going to be out of the country on Masters’ Admiralty business for a while. But once he was back, her trinity would be summoned to the Isle of Man and married.

“Nikolett, what’s hurting?” Nyx asked, voice a little too loud.

“What?” She blinked, focusing on her vice admiral.

“You’re crying.”

“Am I?” Nikolett touched her temple. Wet.

“I can numb it more.” Elena reached for the capped lidocaine.

“No, it’s fine, I don’t feel it.”

“Then what’s wrong?” Nyx demanded.

Nikolett looked at her and knew she should say something. She’d told Grigoris and Nyx what happened at the Trinity Council meeting.

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