Page 105 of Elven Crown

“There are worse things than dying,Kilda’ari.”

That made her look at him, because she’d thought the same thing herself, countless times, after the more horrific nights with Theodil. Nights like tonight.

They were all horrific.

Hearing the same sentiment from Rowan’s lips, however, framed it in a slightly different perspective. He saw her, all of her, not just the Bloodshadow Heir, who had to be trained and honed and molded into everything the prophecies declared she would be.

Of course there were worse things than dying.

“I know there are,” she whispered, gazing into his hazel eyes. “I’m living it.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Oh? I didn’t realize I had any other option. What am I supposed to do?”

He raised his eyebrows, his gaze flickering back and forth across her face, and his voice dipped again into an overwhelming, almost painful gentleness. Painful because it was just too hard to believe that gentleness was truly meant forher.

“You could run away,” he said. “With me.”

She gaped at him, her mind drawing a blank before she realized he was joking.

He had to be joking. Of course he was.

She burst out laughing. The gruff sound of it echoed against the stone and rubble and the temple walls behind them. “I can’t run away. There’s nowhere to go.”

Rowan gestured toward the valley in front of them with a sweeping wave of his hand. “There’s an entire world. We could go anywhere we wanted.”

Her smile disappeared. He just didn’t get it.

“Rowan, there’s nowhere to go where they won’t find me.”

He stared at her for a long moment, as if searching for any viable way to prove her wrong, just so he wouldn’t have to back down. Then he shrugged and grabbed a handful of pebbles at his side. “True. Not inthisworld, anyway. But there are others.”

His allusion to the Gateway and a separate world beyond it wasn’t subtle, but it didn’t have to be. He wasn’t the first to consider such a thing, and he wouldn’t be the last.

Still, Rebecca could never join him in something so heinous, so risky.

“If I didn’t know you,” she said, “I’d call you mad for even suggesting that.”

“Who says I’m not?” he asked with a wink.

His joking nature wasn’t as infectious anymore.

“It would never work anyway,” she added. “We’d be caught immediately, and then what happens? Whatever they did to me then would make my training look like a luxury getaway. And you? They might kill you.”

Rowan shrugged. “For me, it’s worth the risk.”

How could he say something like that? How could he tell her in all confidence that he would risk agonizing death, dishonor against his clan, every facet of his life turned upside down and destroyed, just because he’d attempted to help her run away?

That wasn’t worth the cost.Shewasn’t worth the cost.

She had to make him stop thinking like this. It was going to get him killed. Then Rebecca would be completely alone, forever, without even a modicum of escape from her destiny and her duty.

The kind of escape Rowan had always given her.

“I have to keep doing this,” she told him firmly. “For now. There isn’t any other way. I have to find my limits, all of them, and there’s no one better than Theodil to help me find them before I can move on.”

“No one better to break you beyond recognition, you mean.”

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