Page 54 of A Touch of Poison
That damn phrase again. It haunted me, battling with my anger and hurt and the harsh words Bastian had given me. Even now, when I’d sworn I wouldn’t bother speaking to him, a question tugged on me, drawn by that inescapable phrase.
“What did you mean when you said…?” But it sounded silly as my words broke the silence. A foolish girl asking for something he couldn’t give. “Never mind.”
He finally looked at me for the first time in hours; it felt more like days. Not just a glance, either, but a long, deep look. “What were you going to say?”
I gritted my teeth, but it was out there now—or at least half out there. Fine. Better to get this done at last—and better speaking about this than accidentally spilling what Elthea had done. “When you said ‘remember all of this is real,’ what did you mean?”
His back straightened and the reins creaked in his grip as he turned to the road ahead.
Just when I thought he wasn’t going to respond, he opened his mouth. “It was the first time I realised you might some day find out what I was doing.”
That was a pretty way of putting it. “That you were using me.”
He winced, and I felt a little bad.
But sometimes the truth was less painful than skirting around it.
“It had never crossed my mind before that moment. But having you in my rooms, it hit me all the harder.”
“The fact you might get found out.”
He turned back to me, shifting in the saddle as though all his attention was on me and me alone. “The fact there was a vast, vast gulf between what we were supposed to be and what we really were.”
A shiver ran through me.What we really were. I couldn’t even summon some harsh truth to push back against him and everything those four words suggested.
“Kat…” He blasted a sigh. “In that moment, I wanted to tell you everything. Why I was there. My plans. How it had started one way, but that we had galloped off course and were out in the wilds with no map.”
His gaze might as well have been a grip around my throat for all I could summon any response.
I’d been so lost in my hurt, it had never crossed my mind that he had wanted to share the truth with me. I’d certainly never dreamed that his plans had been blown as drastically off-course as mine.
Our plans that were so similar.
Somewhere, the gods were laughing.
“I wanted to tell you how it scared me,” he murmured. “And how it gave me something I’d never had before. But I couldn’t.” The corner of his mouth rose, but there was nothing happy about it. “I couldn’t risk revealing the truth just in case I was wrong about you and you revealed it to unCavendish. And you… I couldn’t put that on you when you were in such a precarious condition.” His gaze fell to my fingers as they squeezed the reins. “So when I placed my orrery in your hand and told you to focus on the links, the feel of it, the reality of it… I wanted to help you ground yourself, but I also wanted—neededyou to know that everything I did for you, everything I wanted for you, everything that happened between us was real, even if you found out the truth later.”
My eyes burned.
I didn’t want to believe him. I wanted to tell him it was a pretty story. I wanted to shove it back at him.
And yet I believed him.
Not because he couldn’t lie, but because it aligned with what I knew, like a constellation mapping out his shape in the sky.
Everything between us had felt real. His outrage on my behalf. His attempts to give me something bright in the bleak grey of my existence. His kindness when I’d been so lost.
Truth be told, I’d known those things were real. Always.
But I’d been in denial, drowning myself in it.
Because if that was all real—if what he’d told me was true… Well, I’d had something precious and beautiful, hadn’t I?
And I’d lost it.
They might say it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Buttheywere full of shit.
