Page 186 of Season Warriors & Wolves

“And yours?”

“Mine…mine have always been passing. I’ve felt all one can feel, but nothing really stuck with me long enough.”

“Besides love.”

“Besides that,” she said, smiling shyly. “I think I am just too grateful to have what I have to acknowledge what I once did not have. Forgetting was easy for me. Snow, Cai, Alaric, this whole kingdom made it easy.”

“Are you suggesting I try to forget?”

“You aren’t like Snow, trying to grasp lingering pains to use as a weapon. On the contrary, you use it as a poison, as if existing is wrong and your past sufferings made it right again. It would be difficult to forget. Like with poison, you’d go into withdrawal. But…rewriting what you think of yourself, of your existence…that could be easier. It was easier for me. Your poison could easily be medicine with a little change in what part of your past you use. Roots, stems, leaves, don’t use them. Use the flower. What came out of them. A loving, caring, bright, and righteous human being.” The silence following was perplexing. “Am I wrong?” she asked.

“No. No, Nia, you aren’t.”

She scooted a bit closer and leaned in to whisper. “He is waiting at your door for me. Will probably want to know what was wrong.”

“He is?”

A nod. “What do I tell him?” she asked, gently resting a gloved hand over my arms, where the thickest burns were.

“My stomach. Tell him it was my stomach.”

“Eren, maybe—”

“We do not talk, Nia,” I said, standing and helping her up as well. “I don’t think he even knows my middle name.”

Kilian stood in the far corner of the terrace, leaning against a wall, all dark and brooding as he’d always been since he was younger. He watched my sister speak to her men, his eyes only on her, even though Lazarus had gotten a little bit too close to his wife.

His brows dipped a little when he saw me, a move so minute it would have been unnoticeable on everyone else. His Majesty was too stern for his own good.

“Have I upset you, old friend?” I said, clasping his shoulder, but the man was unphased by my nonchalance.

“Should it upset me?”

“No.”

“Then why is it?”

“You put much unnecessary thought in what you see.” I pointed my chin to Lazarus. “Don’t you mind that he still circles her like a vulture?”

“Who cares who looks at her,” he said, pushing his hands in his pockets. “When she looks at me like that.”

I glanced over at my sister to find her looking at Kilian.

My arrogant friend puffed his shoulders a bit, dusting some invisible lint from his perfectly cut and ironed jacket. “I’m not scared of pigeons, Eren.”

“You’ve gotten worse. A severe case of madness.”

“Yet here I am, married to the woman I love. Your prick of a lover can’t even guess your eye colour correctly.”

Sigh. “He is not my lover.”

“Hm. If I recall this morning correctly, both your di—”

“Fine,” I gritted out and he raised a brow. “We are…lovers.”

Memphis cooed from the skies, shifting into a large cat and rushing to my sister who almost squeezed her life out of her, hugging her bonded to her chest.

Snow unwrapped the letter to her collar and quickly read it, her shoulders raising and falling fast. Her face had paled beyond her normal colour.