Page 65 of Broken Star

“Would you have preferred to carry that weight yourself?” he asks me. “Would you have slept better knowing you’d taken an innocent human life?”

Circe’s musical laugh cuts through the air again, stopping me from replying.

“They were hardlyinnocent,”she says with another wave of her hand.

I don’t care. I don’t look at her. I only look athim.

“It wasn’t your choice to make,” I say, the wind gaining strength as my anger builds. “You don’t get to decide what I can and can’t handle. You don’t get to protect me from the truth just because you think I’m too weak to face it.”

“I never said you were weak.” His voice stays infuriatingly calm.

“Then what do you call what you just did?”

“A tactical decision.” The words leave his lips so smoothly, soemptily, that my magic surges in response, rattling through the air like a coming storm.

“Tactical,” I repeat, as emptily as he did. “No. You made a choice for me. Just like you always do. You manipulate, you control, and you decide what’s best for me without giving me a say. It’s?—”

The words knot in my throat.

Humiliating? Violating? Infuriating?

All of them fit. None of them are enough.

Riven watches me, his eyes colder than the frost playing on his fingertips.

“The pig needed to die quickly,” he says, holding his sharp gaze with mine. “You would have wavered once you realized he used to be human, and that hesitation could have compromised the ritual.”

“You don’t know that!” The water droplets fly toward him, but he deflects them with his sword. “You just assumed I couldn’t handle it, like how you assume everything about me, all the time, in a twisted, selfish attempt to protect me.”

“Protecting you isn’t selfish.”

His words are like a slap, sharp and unexpected.

Then he’s sheathing his sword and moving forward, closing the space between us until I’m forced to lift my chin to meet his eyes.

“Is it really so impossible for you to understand that I care about keeping you alive?” he continues, the air growing colder around us. “That I care aboutyou?”

I freeze, his words echoing through my mind like a punch to the chest.

“You only care about what I can do for you,” I finally say, since that’s what he told me at the dryad’s tree. “You don’t actually care aboutme.”

His jaw tightens, and a flicker of something dangerously close to pain flashes in his expression.

And then—like always—he buries it. Locks it beneath the ice before it can surface.

“Fascinating,” Circe purrs, watching us like we’re her favorite form of entertainment. “Such passion. Are you certain there’s nothing left between you two?”

“This was a marriage to unite the Summer and Winter Courts,” I snap at her, more magic stirring inside me as I remember Riven’s proposal in Lysandra’s throne room. “So we can stand strong against the Night Court.”

I glance at Riven, watching his frost spread out beneath his boots, crackling along the ground.

“You say you want the truth,” he tells me, stepping forward, the frost on the ground traveling with him as he moves, “but every time you get it, you twist it into another reason to hate me.”

I flinch, but I don’t back down.

“Given that you bargained away your feelings for me, I didn’t think you’d care whether I hate you or not,” I say, and water droplets spiral in the wind around us, matching the storm of emotions in my chest.

The temperature plummets, and delicate frost patterns climb from his fingers to his elbows.

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