Page 150 of Embers of Ruin

My fingers curl around the ember as my eyes sting. “It was never mine to command, Goddess.”

“It was always yours to give.”

A choice. It was always a choice. After Mara chose for me. After Thorin dragged me across a continent. After rebels locked me in a glass cage. After a traitor in the palace led the rebels to take me in the dead of night, after swearing fealty to their king. After everyone looked at me and saw a cure, a weapon, a vessel, a way out of their suffering.

Now I’m given a choice.

The laugh that leaves me is small and broken. "That’s almost funny."

Illurine looks at me with all the patience of something that has watched kingdoms become dust. “It is not meant to be.”

“No,” I whisper, tears blurring my face. “It never is.”

Thorin moves then, barely, as if the smallest motion might shatter the frozen world around us.

“Lyra.”

I look at him as my eyes soften. I would have given it freely. We were always going to be together—king and queen, or simply as mates. The divine has funny ways of shaping worlds.

He is still on his knees, one hand gently holding mine. Not reaching. Holding. Because he is mine, and I am his.

“When I first learned of you, years ago, I thought….” he starts slowly, as if every word has to be pulled from some place deep enough to bleed, “I thought that if I found you, if I trained you, if I brought your power close enough to mine, then we could end it. The curse. The rot. All of it. End it, for both of us. For everyone on Solaris.”

The ember pulses in my palm.

“And now?” Illurine says, her patient gaze on him.

His gaze drops to my hands, then rises back to my face. “Now I wish I would have done what the kings before me never had the courage to do.”

“You thought I was your salvation,” I say.

His face tightens, but he nods.

“You thought I existed to save your kingdom. But I also know you knew I was your mate, and that you tried to protect me from those who would have harmed me.”

“Yes.” One word. A simple confession.

That’s when I know he is finally telling the truth.

His eyes close for half a breath. When he opens them, the king is gone again. There is only Thorin. Exhausted. Ashamed. Ruined by the difference between what he meant and what he did.

My chest cracks. I nod once, because I needed the truth from his lips, and no one else’s.

“At first,” he continues, voice rough, “you were the answer. The cure. The woman every cursed king before me had searched for and never found. I told myself that was all you could be, because anything else was too dangerous.”

His gaze catches mine, and there is so much pain there I almost hate him for making me see it. “Then you became the first thing I ever wanted for myself.”

I stop breathing.

He leans forward slightly, but he does not touch me. “You are mine, Lyra.”

The words strike deep, too deep. Because I am.

My fingers tighten around the ember, and around his hand.

“I failed you,” he says, voice cracking. “You were never a possession—but I can never not see you as mine, Lyra. Gods, I have no right to say it. I know that. But you are mine in the way my heart no longer remembers how to beat without answering yours. Mine in the way your absence tore through me worse than the curse ever could. Mine in the way I would burn every crown, every throne, every cursed remnant of my bloodline if it meant you looked at me and did not see the man who failed you.”

My tears fall then. I can’t stop them. I don’t even try.