Page 37 of The Blade in the Ashes
With a fortifying breath, I gathered as many of the gowns in my arms that I could carry and walked past him to dump them on the bed next to the chest I planned to pack them away in.
“I amnotyour wife.”
He watched as I worked, neither protesting nor offering to help as I continued traveling back and forth from the closet to the chest.
“Not legally,” he admitted with a tilt of his head. “Although that’s easy enough to rectify.”
I glared at him as I passed by, this time with those damn tiaras stacked in my arms.
He’d, admittedly, gone a little over the top with the tiaras. Everything else was beautiful, but these? These were tacky.
“Nikolai, we have enough to worry about right now without diving into whatever history may or may not exist between us.”
“I disagreewith—”
I continued, barely stopping to breathe as the words poured out. “After all, you hardly know me. Not really. You know nothing about my family or my childhood. You’ve never even spent a single night in the same bed withme.Not to mention it’s been a year since we last saw each other, and I don’t know how you spent your last year, but mine was unexplainably awful. The kind of awful that makes it so that I never want to deal with another romantic entanglement for the rest of my life.”
The chest was soon filled, and I pulled a second from under the bed.
“Besides,” I grunted against the weight, and he bent to help me lift it onto the bed. “I don’t know how you’re even joking about something like that at a time like this. The entire realm is falling apart, and it’s up to us to somehow save literally everyone and everything. All of my thoughts pretty constantly rotate between being angry at Thea for a myriad of reasons, being angry at Clay for an entirely separate set of reasons, considering murdering Camilla for one very clear, deserved reason, and trying to plan out the next five things I need to do to keep everyone safe. So, with all that being said, if we could just focus on the tasks at hand, I would greatly appreciate that.”
I finished in a huff, throwing my hands on my hips and gasping for air.
Nikolai only stared at me, the corner of his mouth twitching like he wanted to grin.
“Do you always ramble like that?”
I narrowed my eyes at him as I sighed, frustrated that he hadn’t seemed to actually listen to anything I’d just said.
“I used to do it more,” I confessed, hands falling to my hips. “The Order tried to beat it out of me during my training and then…”
My voice trailed off, unable to carry on with that particular lie.
It wasn’t the Order that had caused this heaviness inside of me that seemed to dull any sense of personality that had remained after I’d allowed myself to be turned into a killer.
It was the loss of Lorelai.
Nikolai must have seen the shadow that cast itself over my features because he fell silent as he moved to sit on the bed, folding his hands in his lap as he watched me begin carrying out jewelry.
“Not that one,” he insisted, his hand seizing mine, when I moved to place the jewels inside the chest.
That damn ruby necklace was in my fingertips.
“I just said—”
He pulled it from my grasp. “I heard you. This one is still special to me, little bird.”
Words escaped me as he took the necklace and folded it inside his jacket pocket. I didn’t bother protesting.
“Do you want to talk about it?” He asked softly when I turned away and forced myself to focus on the task once more.
“Talk about what?”
“About who hurt you?”
My hands stilled as I reached to close the lid.
It was a complicated question, one with many answers.
