He reached out for her hands again and took her shocked fingers in his. “I know it’s a lot. And I realize how crazy it sounds, that I could be in love with someone whom I’ve been taught my entire life to see as inferior, as my enemy… Aydra, I know.” His hands squeezed hers, and his weight shifted. “I don’t expect you to feel the same, but I think you’ve felt something and I wanted— I needed— you to know.”
She didn’t know what to say.
She didn’t know what her face was doing.
She didn’t know how he could utter the words he’d just said to her.
How could he love her?
Years of bickering and loathing each other. And after two weeks of being with her, a few restless nights, and one battle plan later… he loved her?
“You can’t be serious,” she whispered. “You don’t love me, Draven. You love the small fraction of myself that you’ve gotten to know here in the Forest. You love the brief carefree moments we shared where I was able to actually be happy—”
“You told me yesterday that you could not stop thinking about me,” he interjected, “that you came here because you wanted to be with me—”
“I’d been drinking,” she managed.
He raised a brow and gave her a sideways stare as though he didn’t believe her. She shifted the weight on her feet and shook her head.
“Draven… You can’t… you can’t love me. Our races are enemies—”
“Is that the only excuse you’ll give me for not being allowed to love you?”
She swallowed hard, her thoughts flickering to the words of her mother and her brother, the words she’d been fed her entire life. Not to trust him. That he was manipulative.
But in her time in the Forest with he and his people had proved differently…
Everything she’d been told was a lie.
However, that didn’t excuse the ludicrousness of him telling her he was in love with her.
“You don’t know the rest of it, Draven, of what I am,” she continued. “You don’t know my past or my darkness.”
“Then share it,” he said as he stepped forward again, taking her cheek in his hand. “Share your past and your darkness. I want to hear it. Let me in.”
The anvil sitting on her chest grew stiffer, and she struggled to take a breath upon speaking. “I can’t,” she managed.
Hurt spread through every pore on his face down to the center of his core. He avoided her gaze a moment and caressed her knuckles. “Whatever you think you can’t tell me, you’re wrong.” He brought her knuckles to his lips and he kissed them lingeringly.
He stayed and helped her pack her bags, all the while making his usual sarcastic remarks and jokes that made her stomach flutter and her cheeks hurt with a smile. And once she was all packed, he had one of his men carry it down for her.
Leaving this time was not like the last.
His arms hugged around her as they stood on the porch, and for a few moments she allowed her eyes to close, her forehead to lay against his, the swim of his touch on her skin searing into her memory. She wouldn’t see him again until the next banquet.
And then he began to hum the Wyverdraki song.
His body started to move side to side, dancing with her, and she almost laughed.
Her voice joined his hum, and she whispered the words softly as he entwined his fingers with hers. He spun her out a time or two, swaying with her when he would bring her back in. And when she finished up the last of it, he wrapped her into him again.
“Who knew the Venari King was such a romantic?” she mused.
He smiled down at her, and his nose nudged hers. “Don’t tell anyone. You’ll ruin me,” he growled.
Her hand reached up to his face, and she allowed her eyes to memorize his features, this small moment engrained in her consciousness to last her for the next few weeks that she would have to go back to her regular duties. The press of his hand on the small of her back. The entwine of his fingers with hers, fitting together and not against. The small smile on his lips that rose to his dilated eyes.
“I don’t even know what to say to you,” she whispered.
He pushed her hair off her face and pressed his forehead to hers. “Just don’t ignore me when I come to Magnice in a few weeks and we’ll call it even.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“I STILL DO not know for sure that is what we saw,” Ash said five days later as he stood beside Aydra in the Chamber. Rhaif’s brow raised, and he stared between the pair.
Aydra rounded on Ash’s still figure. “Are you… you’re fucking joking, right?”
Ash shrugged, still not looking away from Rhaif’s figure in the chair. “I do not know the tricks of the Venari and Honest. Until we see men on our own shores, I see no reason why we should concern ourselves with the southern seas. The men we fought were half-witted sportsmen at
