Page 78 of The Last Heir of Elsewhere

But I wasn’t.

I felt in my gut that once Lonnie truly came into herself, she’d be a force to be reckoned with—strong and erotic and entirely in control of herself. She wasn’t there yet, though, and I knew that pushing her would only prolong the moment when I finally got to taste my queen.

Until then, every night we spent next to each other was a pleasant sort of torture.

Tonight was no different, and I bit back a curse as I slipped off my boots and shirt and climbed into the bed beside her. She didn’t move an inch as I moved into a more comfortable position, so I was startled when she spoke into the darkness. “Thank you for helping me today.”

I jumped, both at the shock that she was awake, and at the strange feeling of being surprised in the first place. It had been an entire week since I first found her in the barn, and I still wasn’t used to how if we were alone together, I was entirely blind to our future.

I raised an eyebrow. I would’ve bet she was allergic to the word thank you, as I didn’t think I’d ever once heard it escape her lips.

“You’re welcome, love,” I replied.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” she asked.

I stared up at the ceiling, unseeing, unsure what answer I could give her. I wasn’t sure if she would want to know, or how she would take the knowledge that what had begun as a way to test myself, had long since turned into a personal obsession. How would she react if I confessed everything? How lovely I thought she was, how fascinated I was with everything about her, and how even though she held me at arm’s length, this past week had been the best I’d experienced in two hundred years.

“You must be accustomed to nicknames by now,” I said, flatly.

She stiffened. “I suppose.”

I looked over at her, curiously. She reacted strangely every time I made the briefest mention of either Bael or Scion, and until now I’d ignored it, assuming she was preoccupied with her grief and anger. Now, though, I felt compelled to question it. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering why your brother hates you?”

“Sorry?” I asked, startled. That wasn’t what I’d thought she would say at all.

She shifted very slightly into a more comfortable position, but still didn’t roll over to look at me. “Why does your brother hate you?”

That was what I’d thought she’d asked, but hearing it again didn’t make the question make any more sense. We hadn’t discussed Scion at all in the last week, except when I’d mentioned how she’d been healed after Riven shot her. I’d planned to heal her myself, thus making our week together easier from the onset, but I couldn’t say I was sorry that things worked out the way they had.

I wanted her to be happy, even if it wasn’t with me.

“Does Scion hate me?” I asked, stalling for time.

She snorted. “You must know he does. What happened between you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m wondering if I misjudged you.”

My heartbeat sped up. That was good—perhaps I would be able to make this evening count after all. “Scion might be angry that I left,” I began. “But more likely it’s because I killed our father.”

She stiffened, and finally rolled over to look at me. “Why?”

I appreciated that she assumed there was a reason, rather than immediately condemning me as a murderer. “It’s difficult to explain.”

“Try.”

I sighed. I rarely explained myself to anyone, and even when I’d tried, few people understood.

I raised a hand in the darkness, tracing patterns through the air like the branches of a tree. “This is how the future looks to me. Like thousands of paths—of branches—all stemming off from a single decision, then each of those branches starts another set, and so on. There are endless possibilities, and every single moment could start the world off on a new path.”

“I didn’t ask for a lecture on prophecy.”

“It would be easier to justify myself if you could see every decision made in the last one hundred years, as I can. If you knew every decision that could’ve been made instead. Let’s say that my father wasn’t a good male, and letting him get anywhere near the crown would’ve spelled disaster for more people than you can probably conceptualize.”

“Why not just tell him that?”

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