Page 104 of The Tsarina's Favorite
“You told me she didn’t know,” Alaina said.
“I couldn’t have you slip and tell her that I spoke to you.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“Great good that did,” she snapped.“You should have just stayed out of it.”
I turned around to stare at her.My hands trembled.I bit back the vitriol I wanted to unleash.I could have done it so easily.What did it matter now?
“I have only ever tried to protect you,” I managed with a calm I did not feel.
“I don’t need your protection!”
“Do you know what the word ‘treason’ means?”
“Of course, I do.”
“I don’t think so, or you would understand why I stepped in.I am already damned to the cruelest fate she could imagine.I did not want that for you.”
“You could have just told me the truth.”Alaina’s voice trembled.The bed nearly swallowed her as she still clutched at blankets.“You didn’t have to lie!”
I crossed back to the bed and sat on the edge of it.I reached out for her hand, but she pulled it away.
“Yes,” I said, head bowed.“I lied to you.I have lied to you about a great many things.I’m not proud of it, but I’ve had little choice.And I will probably lie to you again.”
“I wouldn’t have told her, Kaylay!”
“I couldn’t risk it.If she discovered at any time that I spoke to you, that we conversed regularly, or that we had formed a connection beyond you keeping a pet, she would have had me chained again at her feet, and you would be, Great Holy forefend, debased in some way as viciously as I.”
A thoughtful pause stretched between us.
“Probably,” she admitted.She reached out and put her hand on top of mine.“I’ve seen her ruin the lives of her courtiers before.”
“Every lie I’ve told, I’ve told to keep others safe.”That seemed like truth to me.I couldn’t recall lying purely for my own sake.Usually, my mouth just got me into trouble.“I’m not sorry I’ve done it.I would repeat every one of them.Maybe add a few new ones, if I could do it all over again.But I am sorry that I have had to with you.”
“When did she find out,” Alaina asked, “that you could speak?”
“From the beginning,” which wasn’t a lie.“I pleaded with her not to keep me as a pet, hoping that I might move her to mercy.Instead, she found other purpose for me.”
“Not captivity,” Alaina mused, “but enslavement.”
I put my other hand over Alaina’s.
“She’s jealous,” I confessed.“Being found in your bed just made it so much worse.”
“How could she be jealous of us,” Alaina laughed mirthlessly, “from whom she has taken everything?”
“We have something she can never have: the regard of another.As a bitter, miserable person determined to make others as unhappy as she is, it is something she will never know.Can you imagine how much she must hate it, knowing that a monster such as I may earn the affection of another when she herself cannot?”
“You have earned it because you are not a monster,” Alaina insisted.“And she cannot earn it because she is.”
I pulled both my legs onto the bed and knelt facing her.I took both her hands in mine.I surveyed her hands, small and slender and almost pale against my black, scaled skin.I wanted my hands, my proper hands, to be holding hers, to experience the softness and the warmth directly.But these were my hands, however strange and monstrous, and they would be the only hands of mine she would ever know.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.“If it hadn’t been for me —”
“If it hadn’t been for you, I might have done something drastic these past months.You have been the one bright spot in my time in Ilyichia.Please do not be sorry for that.I could not bear it if I thought you regretted your time with me.”
