Page 81 of Broken Star

Even after I took that deal with the dryad, even after I lost my love for her, and even after her love got twisted into an endless wave of fury directed straight at me. Even after she’s spent days looking at me with pain and disgust, like I’m a mistake she wishes she could erase. Like I’m just a cold, apathetic, insufferable winter prince she wants to throw overboard and let drown in the deepest part of the ocean.

Even after all of that, she still sees me.

A bitter, broken chuckle escapes my lips. It’s not real amusement—it’s never real anymore. It’s just something sharp and jagged clawing up my throat, something that might be grief, resignation, or the sheer, unbearable weight of everything pressing down on us.

“Maybe he was never real,” I murmur, and I hate the way my voice sounds—hollow and distant, like I’m already that version of myself sitting on the cold throne, waiting for my soul to freeze over completely.

I reach out without thinking, my fingers barely brushing her cheek, cold but careful. She’s so warm. So impossibly, painfully warm. And I don’t know how to accept what she’s offering. I don’t know how to let myself believe in something that might disappear the moment we emerge from these Tides.

“Maybe he was just another illusion you wanted to believe in,” I continue, and I’m not sure if I’m trying to convince her, or me. “One that will melt away the moment we leave this place.”

Her breath catches.

Magic hums between us, warm against my ice, stubborn against my resistance.

“He was real,” she insists, and there’s something in her voice that makes me painfully aware of what I erased—of the emptiness that took its place.“Youare real. And you’re not going to melt away. I won’t let you.”

I let out a slow, uneven breath, my throat tightening, the hand that’s still by my side clenching into a fist.

“You really believe that?” I whisper, although I don’t know who I’m asking. Her? Myself? The gods who abandoned me decades ago?

“I have to believe it,” she murmurs, and then—gently, carefully—her fingers trace my arm.

It’s a simple touch. But it feels like so much more. Because it’s also an anchor, pulling me back from the abyss I’ve been drowning in for days.

It’s like she’s choosingme.

My breath shudders. Because hell, I think she’s the only person who’s ever wanted me for something other than power, a throne, and what I could offer.

Instead, she wanted what I gave her in the Wandering Wilds, when I let my walls crack, my magic spill out untamed, and my words slip free before duty could freeze over my heart. She wanted what was there before my father’s harshness, cruelty, and madness forced me to bury it all beneath an endless sheet of ice.

She wanted the moments we shared that I’ll never fully remember. That I’ll never actuallyfeel.

I barely register what I’m doing until my forehead is resting against hers, her warmth melting the ice I’ve been wrapping around myself for years.

And she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t recoil. She doesn’t look at me with the hostility I thought I’d see in her eyes until the end of time.

“I don’t deserve you,” I whisper, and I hate how wrecked I sound.

I hate that she can hear it trembling beneath my skin, and that she can feel it breaking through the ice.

But she doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t contradict me. She juststays.

And that’s worse. So much worse.

Because I don’t know what to do with the fact that I’ll lose her again when we escape these godsforsaken Tides. Therealher, beneath the lead arrow that poisoned her heart.

“You don’t get to decide that,” she whispers, her hands trembling against my chest, my heartbeat racing beneath her touch. “We’ve been through too much for me to lose you. Not to the Tides, not to pain and anger and grief, and definitely not to that empty throne.”

I want to believe her. So badly that I think I might fall apart from it.

But fate has never been kind to me. I learned that lesson as I stared at my mother’s coffin of ice when I was only eight years old.

I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until it finally leaves me in a slow exhale.

“Then promise me you won’t let go. Not now, and not ever,” I say, barely recognizing my own voice. Because it’s raw with something I can’t name, something desperate that’s clawing at the ice that encases my heart, tearing at my soul as it tries to escape.

The words hang between us, the weight of them thick in the air.

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