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“She is free to go.” The king gives a nod to his knights and they allow Emma and Ruth to pass. “Because you are right, she is not my queen. I have found the woman I seek.”
“Love is choice,” I continue before he can get another word out. “You—you wanted to own me. You wanted to keep me for yourself regardless of how I may have felt. You never even allowed me to make the decision on my own and now our town, our people, have suffered because of your selfishness. I shudder to think what might have happened to our whole world if you had gotten your way.”
“Saraphina.” The word is whispered to me by a familiar voice. No, it’s not a word. It’s a name. It’s my name. I don’t know how I know that, but nothing has ever resounded with more truth. “Saraphina,” the voice repeats, sinking deep into my soul. “Calm. Calm.”
I plant my feet and refuse to let him make me feel small. I will be the bud that sprouts from the gray rock of this place. I will be the flower that blooms even despite his shadow.
“If you’re always walking above people you risk walking on them, Eldas. And that’s how you make enemies.”
“You will respect me!” Eldas shouts. “Be someone worthy of respecting first!” I slam the door behind me.
The colors are dry on that landscape of my life and I have no desire to go back to the canvas.”
If I am his queen, does that mean he is my king? Is it, rather than him owning me, that we own each other? We share each other?
You, and anything that is yours, are my responsibility to protect.” “Responsibility,” I whisper, chasing it with a sad laugh. “Are my honor to protect,” he clarifies without hesitation.
“You’re…getting used to my brother?” “People can drink poison if they take it in small enough doses for long enough,” I retort.
“If things were different, you wouldn’t have been you.” He finally looks back to me. His once icy eyes are now tepid pools as inviting and warm as the creeks I would strip bare and swim in underneath the redwood trees deep in the forests around the temple. “And I’ve found I’m very fond of exactly the woman you are. I wouldn’t change a single thing.”
Is this the same Elf King I met weeks ago? Gone is the marble and here is the man and all his glory. I hope he stays.
May tomorrow hold every possibility. And may we be bold and hungry enough to take them for our own.”
“No,” he murmurs. Everything in me shudders at his denial. But then he pulls me toward him, snaring me with the lightest touch imaginable. “I will not kiss you like I did then.” My breath hitches. Through the fan of my lashes I watch him lean forward. “I will kiss you better.”
This prickly, awkward, and somewhat emotionally stinted man has become mine. And whether I intended to or not, I have allowed myself to become his.
“For allowing me to feel not so alone. For showing me every magnificent side of you. For giving me something I did not deserve but will cherish forever—not just last night, but our entire time together until this moment.”
Perhaps he had run the numbers in our equation and arrived at the same result as I—that it was better not to think about what these feelings truly were. It was better not to ask or know, for both of us.
