Page 88 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

Clearly determined to shirk even an ounce of damned responsibility, Maksym waved his hand and sighed. “Maybe you should go after her, no? Offer her some kind of…comfort? I’m sure she’ll come around if⁠—”

“Is she not to be your wife, my liege?” I spat his title with more venom than I intended. “Should you not be the one to offer her your comfort? Start framing out your sham union on the bedrock of freshly ripped open wounds?”

Maksym’s eyes widened before realization settled over his face, and he scoffed. “Oh, I see. Jealousy is not becoming of you, my friend.”

“Jealousy?” I coughed the word, because I’d never heard of something more preposterous. “This isn’t fucking jealousy, Maksym. This is me not knowing what to do to fix this. I was supposed to be the one to decide if she ever found out. Not when, but if, remember? But that just got thrown out the fucking window, and you did nothing to stop it.”

Maksym winced.

He knew I was right, and his prolonged silence only confirmed it.

Weeks ago now, when the frantic sprites came bearing a report of a ravaged Odessan camp overlapping our borders with the Wastes, I hadn’t paid it much heed. Until they mentioned a single survivor: a blonde woman with stunning hazel-green eyes and a necklace bearing the Wynn family crest almost burned into her skin.

The same crest I’d told Eilir to keep an eye out for years ago, on the unfathomably unlikely chance, but I hadn’t wanted to believe the possibility laid out before me. Refused to, actually, until I saw her with my own eye.

That moment rattled me.

Despite her muddied and debris-coated body, despite the gruesome burn crawling up her leg, despite her eyes not opening—I knew it was her. How could I not recognize the person who was my oldest, and arguably only, friend until I had everything ripped out from under me at seventeen?

It was a revelation that had necessitated a very frank conversation with Maksym, Eilir, and Gallan, which two of the three seemed to have conveniently forgotten.

The lone bench in our training stall gave a petulant groan as Maksym dropped onto it, bracing his elbows on his knees and pressing his palms to his eyes.

“Fuck,” he mumbled.

I scoffed. Leave it up to our hells damned king to keep the peace between a dozen warring factions at any given time but be unable to do anything of the sort with interpersonal relationships of his own inner circle. He’d had a hundred damned years to refine those skills, and somehow, he had squandered all of them.

“She’s going to want to leave now. You know that, right?” I shook my head and took a few steps away. “Whatever upper hand you thought you were getting by corralling her into this unfathomable marriage is gone.”

Maksym’s head snapped up. “She’ll die. If she even makes it out of Grimmoria, the Wastes will eat her alive and grind her fair bones to dust. And even if she somehow survived that, the bargain mark would eat at her until she came back. Fuck, it would eat at me too.”

“Did that look like a woman who makes rational decisions when she’s angry? She was considering her odds before. Now you and Eilir sealed that decision for her.”

I could rant endlessly about just how badly the two of them had fucked all of this up, but there just wasn’t a point. They both knew. But what they didn’t know was how critical it was to move into some kind of crisis management with Enora, something I’d done a hundred times over with her, just with much smaller crises. A lifetime ago.

“Fuck,” Maksym mumbled, dropping his face back into his palms. “I upset her at dinner last night too, if you hadn’t gathered.”

What a goddess-damned surprise.

Maksym, fumble an interaction with a woman? Never.

“Of course you did.” I drew up my hood again, giving myself a precious moment of shadowed privacy to scrub my hands over my face before I turned and asked, “How?”

“By just…existing, I think. Talked too little and too much. I don’t fucking know how it started.” He sagged against the wall behind him, a pose woefully unbefitting of his usual regality. “It got…tense. Hostile, even. Just earlier today, I was wondering if it might bring her some kind of reassurance to know she had a friend here, and that she’d be happy to see you after so many years.”

For all his more redeeming qualities, Maksym could be ignorant as all fucking hell—selectively, of course, when it fit in the way he needed it to.

“Happy to see me? Maksym,” I groaned. “I did not leave Odessa on good terms, and you know that.”

The legitimate truth of why I left Odessa was hideous, but even worse was the fabricated version. The one I was forced to pen and sign my name on, and the only one Enora had ever learned of, if her reaction was anything to go by.

For all Enora knew, I’d simply absconded from our kingdom, grown tired of the rigor and pressure of being a high mage in training, poised to be the future right hand of their king. And I’d left in the middle of the night, thrown ten years of careful upbringing right into the face of her father and Odessa itself. It was not something I was proud of, despite having no choice in the matter.

I just never expected coming face to face with the repercussions of that awful day, let alone with it in the circumstances that Max, Enora, and I had found ourselves in.

And my friend, the sometimes willfully ignorant king, knew there were two versions of the truth and all the ugliness that came with both of them.

Still, he had the audacity to ask me, “Why do I feel like there is something you haven’t told me? Bad terms aside, I can’t see how she wouldn’t be even a little relieved to see you.”