Page 77 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
His milky gaze washed over me. “I like to think that I am adaptable when new knowledge presents itself. You were not a queen, and then you were. Dreams must sometimes die.”
I jerked, and looked at him. What did he know of my dreams? “But dreams cannot always die.”
He tilted his head. “One would hope not. For then there would be no sense to hope at all.”
I did not relish this discussion of hope and dreams.
“As for love,” See continued, “when a monster requires another to live and breathe. Then the matter is rather greater than love, it becomes a matter of?—”
“Desperation?” I arched a brow.
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Just that, my darkness. Of survival.”
My stomach churned at his warm surety, which felt too soon and just right at the same time. I turned away.
There was one more place. One more room.
Stairs.
There remained a hall on this landing, though See’s reduction to princedom had shortened its length.
I entered his bed chamber soon after. A hand clenched myinsides and rendered me short in breath and feeling and thought. Here was where I last believed him.
Here was where I had said goodbye.
I stared at the painting of the Perantiqua who was first undone by him. She was lost in lust and in confusion of the watchful silence of a king. She was untouched by the knowledge of ruin. She had not thought past goodness of deed and goodness of self. This Perantiqua would not have accepted that an ancient force might render a king desperate and blind and hopeless in romance so that her mere arrival would undo him thoroughly and forever. She would not have understood that at all.
But this version of me? “I knew.”
“Of what did you know?” See murmured from the doorway. He, too, must have felt the sadness of our last time here. I had whirled from the window to drag words of love from his cruel mouth. And then…. Was he remembering sliding in and out of my ass? He certainly could not be thinking of how innocent and pure our lovemaking had been.
Because he had known what lay ahead. As See always did. And even if he might not know a particular future, then he was very practiced in the feeling and flow of past, present, and future, so could guess well enough.
Thatwas why he lingered in the doorway. Because of his betrayal of that exchange and that moment.
I inhaled. “When I traveled to your gala, I understood that our time together was a goodbye to what we had been. I had connected that you felt this too.”
“I felt it. I feared it.”
I drew forth the memories of a trembling queen in a carriage. “You feared the moment you must betray me, and I feared the loss of our simple and innocent romance.”
“I feared the limits of mystrengthto betray you. I feared failing us and so failing to deserve you. But I yearned for the end of our simple romance. I wished for what lay beyond.”
I floated in my queenly version of a walk to the bed. I traced a hand over the last place we had rested with See curved around me, and still inside me. “When you woke, you were stronger.”
“Such relief in greater strength. I was hurtled to such confident heights that I strode forward to betraying you as I never could have. For the first time, I felt sure that I could provide all that we needed. The surge in power quietened uncertainties clamoring in me. You do not know that many futures existed where I proved an undeserving match. Far more of those than the futures where I succeeded. All futures where I failed led to the end of the world. When I woke from that brief slumber, I knew at last that my part in the play was complete. Before that slumber—before what we shared that night—I had little confidence, and ample fear and uncertainty. When you first entered the haze, I was not granted enough time to see the exact details of our time in this room, so I was blind except to the dooming consequences that would ensue if I did not say or do the right thing. A monster has never felt more in the declaration of his love because uttering those three words could just as easily have ended the world as saved it.” His lips curved. “The greatest irony of my existence is that transcending love forced me to surrender in love and confess to it also. How I agonized over the right path in those minutes, but in the end, you were about to leave the chamber, and though I had not seen the details of that night, I had seen that our bodies must intertwine.”
I toyed with the heavy blanket. “For you to gain enough power to betray mewith confidence.”
See cupped a hand under my chin, and I let him.
The touch obliterated my thoughts for a single moment where our hearts thumped in joyous unison. See bent his head to peer into my eyes. “There was a fate to be realized that night. But I was still a weaker king in those hours, Perantiqua. That weaker king did not yet deserve you, for he collapsed under the addiction and allure of all you were. In those finalseconds before I surrendered and confessed to love, I had no care for the world’s ruin nor betrayal nor power. I was starved for you and choked at the most hopeless and blindest peak of desperation. I simply did not have the strength to stand against my feelings and thoughts and dire knowledge for I was irrational with you. A weaker king, as I have said, which I am not any longer. But perhaps the timing of ancients is as perfect as necessary.”
They had kept him weak to behave weakly in that instance.
There was sense in that.
There was a warm balm spreading over some wounds. As towering in queendom as I was, simple hurts had remained. The child in me had wished to be loved for the sake of being loved, even though the woman in me fathomed such love was not what she wished for.
