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She's just beautiful. Beauty in its purest form. I'm captivated by her eyes, ever my favourite feature of hers, so dark and full of mischief. Black liner runs along her eyelids in a sharp point, her lashes stained black. A blush creeps across her cheeks when I don’t say anything and I can tell she is a little nervous. She's not dressed up this much before and the look in her eyes is begging me to say something. "I'm no better than all those other men, because I'd kneel at your feet for the rest of my fucking life."
"Why are you always so well dressed? Do you have a stylist?" "Three," I say, watching her laugh at me for that. I grin, pleased that my honest confession appears to have blown away her nerves.
"Bare feet?" "Well, I only have my combat boots and I draw the line at anything with a heel on,” she lowers her voice to a whisper. "Plus, sorceresses never wore shoes." I smile at the gesture to her bloodline, leaning down to kiss her. The size difference is a slight issue. "No shoes it is."
Is this what missing someone is? I hate it. In the five months since I last saw her, I've been as stressed as I've ever been.
Where is she?
"She's here?" "We were ambushed on the Hallin Pass," he says, and my dread becomes suffocating. "We had fifteen badly hurt. She's helping carry the injured to your healing halls." I need to get a hold of myself. I haven't felt relief like this since my son woke up from a particularly bad head injury.
Sorry I'm late!" Comes the most cheerful voice I’ve heard in weeks, and I swear my heart fucking stops.
I turn my head, seeing her eyes shining with delight and looking at absolutely no one except me. Her hair spills loose and glossy to her hips, her skin a light brown. She looks happy and healthy, and it is a relief. Warmth floods my chest. She's mine, and she only has eyes for me.
Fuck this guy. I have other people who can take his job. I add making sure he has nothing to do with Renna to my mental to-do list. Fuck. No. She wouldn’t like that. I have to find some compromise between my need for control and her need for freedom. I don’t want to put her in a cage.
She sits at the other side of the table, too fucking far away.
In true Renna fashion, she jumps a supernatural distance over the four-foot table, catapulting herself across the wood and into my arms, almost sending us flying off the chair. And just like that, the heavy weight that has burdened my shoulders for five months disappears. "I missed you so much!" She says, laughing into my chest as we wobble on the chair. "Longest fucking five months of my life," I whisper, holding her close. With a deep breath, her body melts into mine, like she’s needed this as much as I have. To go without each other for so long is a curse inflicted on us by our jobs, but
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“I’ve been so excited to see you,” she whispers, burying her head in my neck between quiet moans. "Eia cerelanié," I whisper, in her native tongue. You make me whole. She does. She is a pleasure far too great for a sinner like me, but I take everything she gives me all the same.
“So you leave. And then what? You start up a whole new life as a peasant or a housewife, stay there for seven or eight years, and then just vanish?" "That's my plan. It's all I have." The idea of Renna living as someone else's wife sparks a fury in my soul. Not just because I want to be the only one to touch her, but because it's so…not her. She'd be moulding herself to fit in a box that was not made for her. It’s not happening.
"How can you say that when there were wars over sorceresses?” She says, shouting now, her face wrought in emotion. “The enemy finds out I am one, and they'll stop at nothing. You'd put the lives of your entire army at stake to protect some woman you fuck? Because that doesn't sound like good leadership to me."
I'd have done this a while ago if I'd known it'd make her face light up like that. Shit, I'd find a way to rearrange the constellations in the sky if she asked me to. I'm a lost cause.
My heart sinks with every word I read, and I know my relationship with Renna has gone too far. They'll pick her apart. I've given my people hope of a new Queen when there is none. Some of the articles are kind about Renna, but most of them are riddled with envy. "My lord?" Fuck. I hand him the papers that weren’t cruel about Renna. “Shut these papers down.” I hand him the last three. “Shut these entire businesses down.” I draw the line at people printing shit about her like that. That’s too far. I’m fucking furious as Frian leaves. I hope he can get rid of them before she sees any.
If I was someone else, and if she was someone else, I’d have put a ring on her finger last year. But as she has told me, being a Queen is her worst nightmare. Her being Queen is the public’s worst nightmare. And having another wife who is unhappy because I can’t give her enough time is my own nightmare.
“We just have to keep things…in line.” She lets out a shaky exhale. "Then that's just too bad, Rex." I don't like where this is going. "And why is that?" "Because I'm falling in love with you," she says, frankly, as if she'd just dropped a weight that had been on her shoulders for months. But that weight comes tumbling out of those small hands and crashing down onto my own shoulders, and now I feel like I’m sinking. Plummeting to the bottom of the ocean because the weight is too much for me to overcome. To love me is to be condemned to death.
And there’s a piece of me who’d rather just have a fraction of Rexxan than none at all.
It’s not bitter between us, it’s just not sweet anymore either.
"I know you are. I don't guard you because I think you can't defend yourself. I guard you because...because….” "I know why you do it," I’m sobbing harder, burying myself further into his arms. He does it because he’s been broken so many times by so many people that guarding me has become his life raft.
"Never let people tell you that, Renna. Just because you haven't lost your ability to have fun like the rest of us, it doesn't make you immature.
As I run through the list of people I’ve encountered in my life, I struggle to identify one that I haven’t hurt. I struggle to identify one that wouldn’t be better off if I’d never met them. I slap a hand over my mouth to muffle the sob that threatens to leave my lips.
She’s crying. And gods above, I hate that. I’d reforge the boundaries of this earth if it would make her happy.
Today, I’m going to send him away. Today, I need an evening off. Today, life comes first, not work.
She looks sleepy, and it makes me want to look after her. I've never had that desire for anyone but my son before.
How ironic that the woman who has captivated me so intensely can summon the very substance that ruined my entire life.
She's all I want. I have to fix this. I have to tell her how I feel.
I want to go to her to help her through it, but I am faced with a genuine queue of people waiting to speak to me about urgent matters. And if that isn’t an allegory for our relationship, I don’t know what is. Renna isn’t a woman who deserves scraps of my time. She deserves it all, and I can’t give her that. But fuck, I just cannot let her go. I’d rather die than see her with another.
I rub my thumb over the little frown between her brows, smiling as it goes away. She grumbles, shuffling nearer to my hand. "Rexxan," she sighs, in her sleep. "You're here." I kiss her hair again. "I'm here." I'm here, and she's back safe. She's okay.
Maybe I need genuine help, but the idea of making Rexxan fucking desperate for me is awfully appealing right now.
"You're playing with fire, Rennalya," he calls. "I'm a fire sorceress, Rexxan, I was born for this."
Her skin glows, kissed by the sun who is ever as desperate to touch her as I am.
Privileged to breathe the same air as this woman who weaves her magic through my world and everything in it. I want all of her.
She's glistening wet, begging for me, and my fingers close and open in a fist. In terms of torture, I think her pulling my teeth would be preferable to this. She’s two feet away from me, and I miss her.
If I gave it everything, I could probably break free, but this is so much more than her tying me up. This is an exchange of trust. It’s an exchange of power, one that she needs and one that I’m happy to concede if it’ll make her happy.
She is both the poison that plagues my veins and the antidote that restores them.
But of course, she doesn’t fucking do as I ask, because when does she ever?
If I can last twenty seconds I'll view it as an achievement of a lifetime, because the way she looks right now is unforgettable.
In our downstairs bedroom,
our 🫠
Rexxan has told me more than once that he does not change the weather because it doesn’t leave him with enough energy to manage his burns. Now what should be a happy sight is stained with sickening concern for his welfare.
"I was worried." "Renna, what's gotten into you? This isn't like you," he says, gently. He sounds like he is in agony. "I'm in love with you!" I say, into his chest. “You don't need to say it back, and I'm not asking you to either. But I'm strong enough to admit that I'm in love with you and I hate seeing you like this. What are they doing to you in here? Why have they done this?" I tug at the straps.
don't know what it was, I was just exploring." "Then fucking explore again!" He shouts, making me jump. He pinches his nose as if exasperated with himself. “Fuck. Sorry.” I repeat the move and he shuts his eyes, his breathing slowing. "It feels nice?" "It feels...it feels like you're cooling them down more than Talyn or Lynna can after seven hundred years of science." I watch the muscles in his chest relax over the next ten minutes, the contours and boundaries of his magnificent body blurring through my tears. I think they're tears of joy. He sits up, brushing my hair out of my face. "Where
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He laughs at me like I am an idiot, and it is carefree and painless. "You're my cure to everything."
I'm going to die of laughter. My girl is an idiot. "Rexxan, you sound so happy. I've never heard you laugh, ever,"
Gods, this woman needs constant supervision. She's fucking adorable, and so, so stupid sometimes.
"Well, you've cheered me up a little, Commander. Thank you." This is what Renna does. Even in the darkest of times, she floods people's lives with joy. She came into my life when my world felt grey, and she has stained it with every colour.
The other two doors in my bedroom lead to my dressing room and Renna's favourite; the bathroom. She’s naked and under the water in the blink of an eye. I suppose the good thing about marrying her is she'd get to have this bathroom— Marrying her? What the fuck, Rexxan?
She wants me, scars and bad moods included. "Renna, I have six bedrooms in my apartments. Five empty. I want you to make a home for yourself in one of them. We can renovate the bathroom to be like this one. I'll pay for it all. Put your clothes in the drawers." "Are you asking me to move here with you?" "It's a fucking tragedy that you sleep at the Shadow Camp, twenty minutes down the road, when you could be here. You get up early and go to work anyway. You're not abandoning your people." "You have a deal, if I get to choose our dinner every night." "And I get to choose the wine?" That one is
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"Yet you cannot help but love them all." "I want her to be mine," I say, not meaning to voice it aloud. "Long term?" "As long as I'm alive."
