Page 127 of The Duke and the Disciple

I’m sorry you feel that way?Aesylt was astounded at how quickly his concern for her had shifted to apathy. She braced herself on the back of the chair. “Now I’m another man’s problem is what you really mean.”

“If that’s what I meant, Aesylt, I would have said it.”

“Well,” she said, throwing up her hands. “Now I understand why you sat there and didnothingwhen they tried to sell me off to the man who betrayed us.”

Rahn didn’t speak for so long, she pulled back the curtain to see if he was still listening. “It was not my place to offer an opinion. And... Maybe this will be good for you. Your brother knows your needs better than I.”

“Goodfor—” Aesylt inhaled a gulp of cool, musty air. Had the room always smelled that way? Had it always felt so... so small and cloying? “Are you punishing me for last night?”

“What a ludicrous suggestion. I already told you I wasn’t upset.” The disgust in his voice was callous and wounding.

She ripped back the curtain and found him sitting at the edge of his bed, bent over his lap. “What’s ludicrous is you becoming someone else entirely without so much as an explanation. Is it so easy to shut me out of your life?”

“Like you did at Revelry?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the one who declared our research ended.”

Aesylt reared back. “That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it’s not.”

He shook his head at the floor, lifting his palms. “What should I have said to them, Aesylt?”

“The truth maybe?”

“What truth?”

Everything inside of her was screaming to just go. Just let things lie. Preserve some shred of dignity. But she couldn’t. She needed to know, even if it shattered her. “That I cannot marry Pieter Dereham because someone else already holds my heart in their hands. That you’re... thatyou’rein love with me, and it would be impossible to watch me wed another man.”

Rahn’s back lifted in a hard breath. He bowed his head lower and dragged his hands through his hair and down to his neck, gripping it. “Oh, Aesylt... That would not have been an accurate claim for me to make.”

She staggered back, her boot catching against a stone. If he’d screamed the words, said them in the heat of the moment, she’d know he hadn’t meant them. But his calm delivery—his utter exhaustion of her—was evident in every tense of his muscles. “Well I don’t believe you, Adrahn. I don’t believe your actions, your words, add up to such careless disregard of me.”

“I care about you... You know I do.” He released a long exhale. “But everything you’ve weighed and estimated about me has been misread. Our research required a level of intimacy, so I may have enhanced the depth of my own emotions to achieve what we needed. Hurting you was never my intention, but I was clear, and we agreed, from the beginning, what it was, what it wasn’t?—”

“Nothing is anything until it is! That’s how all relationships begin, as nothing.” Aesylt turned and paced, grappling for some semblance of control. But she was truly losing it. Inch by inch, she was slipping away. “No, I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I don’tbelieveyou!” she screamed.

He pulled his hands down his face. “I can’t do anything about that, can I? I have been nothing but who I said I was. I’m not a family man. I’m notmadefor that kind of life. And even if I was...”

She saw the strained flex of his jaw... the white of his knuckles as he tensed his hands over his face.

“I don’t feel that way about you. I’m sorry.”

“You cannot possibly—” Aesylt gripped her sides, fighting through the pain of her heart shattering. “You cannot possibly want to see me with another man.”

“Well, I’ve already done that, haven’t I?”

She shuddered in a breath, stunned he would go there. “That was cruel. And unfair.”

“Life is cruel and unfair, Aesylt. You know it better than most.”

“You’retryingto wound me, so it will be easier to walk away?—”

“Stop. This is pointless.”

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