Fearless (The Powerless Trilogy, #3)

by Lauren Roberts

I watch Paedyn through the gaps of a gawking crowd, just as I will for the rest of my life. I’ll be forced to spend my days at her service but never at her side. In her shadow but never truly seen. In love with a girl I’d have bowed to long before she became my queen.

But now, I can’t fathom drowning if she is not the anchor I’m sinking with.

The dress clings to her in a way I long to, eyes sweep over the crowd that I now desperately wish I was in.

And when she kisses me, long and fierce, I realize how happily I’d live the rest of my life at the end of a blade. So long as she is the one holding it.

“Pae.” His voice is ragged. “I would lose my life for you before finding something else worth living for.” His fingers weave into my hair, slide along the back of my neck. “You are my inevitable. In life and in death.”

But I am no stranger to drowning. I’ve been doing just that since the day I looked into her ocean eyes.

My name means nothing to me until she speaks it. Nothing until she claims it as her own.

“You are forever my distraction, darling.”

And I will gladly drown, gladly burn, gladly fall into those blue eyes until the day she looks at me for the last time.

Before I was the Silver Savior, the king killer, the queen-to-be, I was Paedyn Gray. And she is going home.

You think I would not beg to run away with you? My duty may be to the king, but my heart, Pae, is wherever you are. It is in the palm of your hands, the pad of your thumb. So if you leave, I will follow. If you stay, I will bow. Because there has never been a moment when you did not own the only piece of me that mattered—loving you made me matter. And I ache to be full again.

I can feel the exact moment my heart shatters. It’s when I turn, my eyes crashing into ones well memorized. When mist meets the deepest sea. When a Shadow faces its Flame. When inevitability meets its end. When I stare into the face of what it is I love most.

“Paedyn, I love you. Like nothing else before, I love you. And I’ve been waiting to tell you since I realized your eyes are my favorite color and your freckles the only constellation worth looking at. I could lie—say that you’ve stolen my every thought and heartbeat like the thief you are, but all of me was already yours. Pae, you are my inevitable.”

“You are my inevitable. In death, and in love.”