“With what time?” I round on him. “Tomorrow, if everything goes correctly—and I know I don’t need to tell you what rides on tomorrow, that it must go correctly—then the magic will be out of me. This power was never mine, it’s yours. There’s no point in my learning it now or ever. I’m just a bystander, an accident, a thief. I am a brief note in your symphony, and it hurts too much to pretend to be anything else.”
His gaze softens, his brows turning up slightly in the center. “I don’t want you to hurt,” he says softly.
“I’m used to being hurt. I can survive being hurt.” It’s all of these other feelings that are difficult. It’s the happy feelings that I don’t know what to do with; the ones that highlight just how deep all my other wounds are.
“That’s not a way to live. You should have never had to live that way.”
“Well I have, and I’ve done just fine.”
“You survived, and that’s commendable given that I only know the tip of the iceberg of your suffering. But merely surviving isn’t any way to live. I want you to thrive—you deserve to thrive.” He takes a small step forward. I take a wide step back.
“You shouldn’t concern yourself with me.” I shake my head.
“But I do.”
“But you won’t.” My words are as cold and icy as the air seeping through the window at my back. “Soon enough, I’ll be nothing to you. All of this, whatever this is, will be nothing. You’ll be king and I’ll just be a human living on your land across the Fade.”
“It’s your land now,” he insists.
“Stop being kind to me.” My voice raises a fraction. “Stop pretending like any of this is real.”
He staggers, almost as though I’ve struck him. Davien shakes his head slowly. “Every minute of this has been real for me. More real than I ever wanted or asked for it to be.”
“It’s not.” Maybe if I say it enough times, it will be true for both of us. “It can’t be. Not just because of what our futures hold. But because we never were even supposed to have met.”
“But we did. And despite all odds—”
“Don’t say it.” I know it’s coming. There is the same tone in his voice as there was when he was speaking to Shaye. “If we stop this now, we can pretend none of it has happened.”
“We are beyond pretending.”
I know what he says is true, but I continue anyway. I can’t stand idly by as he condemns us both. “Neither of us will have to be hurt more than we already will be, already are. We can—”
“Despite all odds, I love you, Katria.”
I can’t do anything but stare at him. I burn with anger, with frustration, with passion. No three words have ever made me happier, or cut me deeper. Nothing has ever meant more to me while simultaneously having to mean nothing at all.
“No you don’t,” I whisper.
“I do.” He takes a step forward. “I love you in a way that I never expected to love anyone. I have always been destined to be thrown into a marriage of convenience. I never expected to love.”
“And I don’t want it.” I shake my head. My eyes are burning, tears pricking at their edges. “I don’t want your love.”
His expression crumples. I’ve wounded him more with those words than I’ve ever seen him before. He hovers in limbo, mouth opening and closing, clearly unable to figure out what he wants to say next. I allow him to stew in the silence. I’ve made myself clear.
“Why?”
I shake my head at his question, glancing askance.
“Will you not even give me the kindness of knowing what I have done to wrong you? Was I just not the man for you? I will accept whatever it is you say, even if it is nothing more than that you simply don’t feel the same. But please, take pity on me, and tell me clearly, just this once, because I thought… I thought that you might—”
“It’s not you,” I confess, knowing that silence would be easier—better. But I don’t have it in me to wound him in the way I should. “I will never love anyone.”
“What?”
“I made that vow to myself long ago. I made it before you even bought my hand. The belief that I would not fall in love with you had nothing to do with you.”
“Why do you refuse love?” The question is earnest and filled with naivety.
