Page 20 of The Crown's Awakening
“I said no.” I push against Teorin again, weaker now, my hands slipping against his coat. “I said no. Are you not hearing me?”
No one answers.
He steps fully onto the deck and continues forward. I keep fighting him anyway, twisting, pushing, trying to force him to lose his grip, but he holds me without effort, carrying me across the deck as though my resistance is nothing more than movement to account for. The men step aside without a word.
He carries me through the nearest door and into the interior of the ship. The air changes at once, warmer and heavier, the scent of oil and leather lingering along the back of my throat. The corridor is tighter than the one we left, the light dimmer, the space closing in without effort.
“Teorin, stop.” My voice comes faster now, urgency breaking through everything else. “Stop. Put me down. I’m not doing this.”
He does not stop.
The door opens.
He sets me down inside.
My feet hit the floor unevenly and I catch myself against the bed, the room swaying briefly before leveling out again.
“No.” The word comes out again, immediate. “No, I’m not staying in here.”
He closes the door.
The sound carries more weight than it should.
Panic rises, breaking through whatever control I had left. “This is not happening.” I push away from the bed, moving toward him, toward the door. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to decide where I go. You don’t get to just take me and lock me in a room like this.”
“Asharin." His tone is as though he is trying to sound bored. There is something else underneath it.
“No.” My voice lifts again. “No, I said no. I have said no this entire time and you do not get to ignore that because it is inconvenient for you.”
He stands a few feet away, watching me.
There is nothing in him that suggests he is going to stop.
“You carried me here when I said no.” The words come faster, anger cutting through the panic. “You put me on your ship when I said no. And now you’re going to keep me here until I stop fighting you?”
“This is to keep you alive.”
“Fuck you,Teorin.” I say his name like it is poison. “Don’t pretend this is anything else. You need me alive so the Threns can win their war.”
A brief change touches his expression, gone before I can make sense of it.
“I am not part of your war.”
“You already are.”
“No.” I shake my head, the movement unsteady but certain. “You made that decision. Not me.”
He says nothing.
And suddenly the anger intensifies into something else, something colder, something that sinks deeper than anything I have felt since he first spoke. I should never have left Veynar.
Sevrin had disappointed me. He had broken whatever I thought I understood about him in the end. But he had never pretended to be something he wasn’t. He had never stood in front of me and lied with this kind of precision, never made me believe something that wasn’t there just to pull it away when it suited him.
I had seen what Sevrin was from the beginning. In a twisted way, I had understood what he was. I had chosen to walk away fromthat, admittedly because I had come to trust Arven. Teorin. And I had walked straight into this. A fucking trap.
“You don’t get to do this,” I say again, quieter now but no less certain. “You don’t get to decide where I go.”
He moves toward the chair.
