Page 234 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

Did she know how many women would have died for such an opportunity? How many humans would kill to be made into vampire royalty?

Did she think I wouldn’t smell my own child on her?

With that thought, fear spears my chest. It is difficult to breathe.

My child.

A threat. Not just a threat, but the greatest threat. How many kings die at the hands of their children?

If she had stayed—if she had listened—

We could have dealt with that.

But now, she is gone, and I will have a child out there in the world, and I am—I am—

I sink to my knees, my forehead pressing to the sharp edge of the wall. My chest hurts fiercely. I stand on a blade’s edge between two emotions, neither of them pleasant, and I hate her for making me feel this way.

I’m ashamed of myself.

I think of every word I said to her. Every flinch of pain across her face.

I never asked for any of this. She was the one who came to my door. She was the one who kept finding ways to stay.

The thought of an empty bedchamber in an empty castle hits me, and it’s more painful than any battle wound I’ve ever endured.

I should go after her. I should hunt her down. I should snip the loose thread in my tapestry, mend this chink in my armor. It’s what my father would have done. It’s what all the prior Nightborn kings would have done.

But she had looked into my eyes and asked me if she would be safe if she left. If years of love and companionship had earned her that right.

I said, “You’re welcome to leave whenever you want. Arrogant of you to assume I’d care enough to go after you.”

Much of that conversation has become a blur, cruelties blending into cruelties. But I remember every word of that answer.

Here, in the face of the magic she created for me, I cannot lie anymore. And it was, indeed, a lie. A childish one.

Here, I cannot lie to myself.

She’s gone. She is not coming back.

And even if I found her, I wouldn’t be able to kill her.

The weakness in this confession to myself astounds me. Embarrasses me. I hate myself for it.

And yet, I know I would hate myself more, standing over her dead body. I think of another dark-eyed woman, a former queen who had been kind to me when I hadn’t deserved it, who I had not spared, and feel a little pang of regret.

What I felt for Alana was—is—so much greater than what I once felt for a kind enemy I barely knew. My body physically recoils at the thought of what the wound of her death might feel like.

I force myself back to my feet. My hands are so badly cut that the blood overflows the carvings. I got some of it on my face, stinging my eye.

I raise my gaze to the thing of beauty before me. This fortress, designed to hold a greater power than any king, Nightborn or otherwise, had ever wielded before me.

And yet I concern myself with some human woman?

I force my shame and my hurt away to a dark place in the corner of my mind, never to be acknowledged again.

Let her go, I tell myself.

She isn’t worth anything, I tell myself.

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