Page 106 of The Tsarina's Favorite
“And I like you.”
We both fell into an embarrassed silence.
“You wouldn’t regret it?”I asked.
“Never.”She took one of my hands and kissed the back of it.“Even though we’re going to be married, will you still respect me afterward?”
“I would have to respect you now first,” I teased.
“Then, my dearest Kaylay,” she whispered as she removed her nightshift, “fuck me like you don’t respect me at all.”
XXXI.
Hours later, sweatand sex thick in the air, I woke to Alaina’s hair in my mouth.Her arm across my chest, her head tucked under my chin, the heat of our proximity, and the effort of our activities invited me to return to languorous sleep even with our impending executions.Perhaps because of it, we pushed ourselves to the brink of passion and the edge of exhaustion, unleashing our desperate need for connection beyond the rigid roles we had to play.
We laughed and teased and touched like young lovers.And though I had been carrying the burden of grief and shame to spirit-breaking limits for almost a year, the tsarina’s decree allowed me to set it aside for several perfect hours because it didn’t matter now.Nothing mattered anymore.Nothing but me and Alaina and our brief happiness together before everything in our worlds came to a stunning, horrible conclusion.
Freezing to death, especially with how much I loathed the cold, might have been my least preferred punishment, perhaps second only to being made to linger for another forty years, enduring the existence I had endured these past months.And I could speak to punishment, especially of the imaginative type that undermined any sense of personal identity.How many times had I lost the things that had hitherto defined me?
But Alaina did not deserve the fate to which she had been condemned.She just wanted to go home, where she was valued, and cared for, and loved, at least loved by more than a lowly nightmarish creature.
If I had a place that I thought of as home, I would have joined her in that fervent desire.I was alone though.Every hope of family met with disappointment, tragedy, failure, and rejection.I didn’t think Alexei ever thought of me now, beyond a horrifying embarrassment he would spend the rest of his life trying to erase.My isolation made it easy to relinquish this life.But Alaina....
The Kind and Fair assured me she would live with my loyalty, and yet, putting myself between the princess and the tsarina had only worsened the situation.Perhaps the tsarina could see that I would give nothing for her when I would willingly give everything for Alaina.
Alaina snuggled harder into my arms, grip fierce.She kissed the underside of my chin though to demonstrate her wakefulness.
“We should be making escape plans,” Alaina mumbled into my shoulder, “but I don’t see any way out.”
“We are too diligently watched here to make a successful escape.”I had failed several times already without the vigilance the guards were instructed to employ now.“Perhaps we can find some flaw in the ice palace itself.There were weak spots in the plans.”
“Weak spots?”She perked up.“How do you know that?”
“Because I saw them.”And then I realized that Mikhail the Jester had seen them, not Kaylay the Bird.I added, “It’s remarkable what people say around creatures they think are beneath them.”
Alaina accepted that.
