Page 72

And worse, far worse, if I were truly being honest with myself…

Could I even picture a single day of the rest of it without Atlas in it at all?

Could I ever bring myself to say goodbye?

Atlas

Ihad spent three years certain I would never know peace again. And then a furiously courageous, mortal girl had walked into my world with a notebook full of monster sketches and ruined the theory entirely.

I lay there in the grey hush of early morning, the sheets still carrying the scent of her, as I let myself do something I almost never allowed.

I let myself imagine it.

I let myself dare to dream.

The whole of it.

The years stretching out ahead, and she was centered in every one of them. I could see it with an ease that should have frightened me. Alexandra by my side in the council chamber, arguing with my generals until they forgot they outranked her. Alexandra learning the names of my people, my history, my world. The way she had once learned the weaknesses of creatures that crawled out of the Rift, with that same relentless, stubborn hunger. She would make a magnificent queen. I had no doubt of it.

But the truth, the one I turned over in the dark when there was no one to see it, was that her crown had never been the thing that mattered most to me.

It was simply her.

I wanted her at my side because the thought of a single day without her in it had become unbearable. Because somewhere between an apocalypse and a war, this woman had become the axis the whole of my world turned upon. And I no longer remembered how to want anything that was not, in some way, her. It wasn’t a noble feeling. It wasn’t even a dignified one. But I couldn’t keep my hands off her. I couldn’t stop thinking of her, the taste and the delectable sounds she made. The maddening shape of her, even in the middle of strained conversations and a kingdom in pieces. It had stopped being affection somewhere a long way back and become something far closer to obsession. And Gods help me, but I had no desire whatsoever to cure myself of it.

And yet last night, I had watched the truth of where we still stood written plainly across her face.

That moment in the doorway of the great hall, when the whole kingdom had risen to its feet for her, and she had gone white as a sheet and frozen, half-turned, ready to bolt. I had seen it for exactly what it was. Not fear of the crowd. Not even fear of me. It was the simple, quiet conviction, buried deep and stubborn, that she did not belong here. That she was a soldier in borrowed finery, a fraud in a foreign court, waiting to be found out.

She was wrong.

She belonged here more than any of them.

And I was going to spend however long it took proving it to her. So, I had asked her to stay, and then I had made myself stop. Because I knew my Alexandra, and I knew that to push her now, to press for an answer before she was ready to give one, was the surest way in all the realms to drive her to the wrong one. She had to choose this. Choose me. Of her own stubborn free will, or it would never hold.

Content with the thought, I reached across the bed for her.

And found it empty.

My eyes snapped open. The space beside me was cold, the warmth long gone, the sheets thrown back. For one black, breathless heartbeat, the calm shattered entirely, and something close to panic clawed up my throat. An ugly, irrational certainty that I had misjudged it. That I had pushed too hard after all, asked too much, and she had slipped away in the night rather than tell me no to my face.

I was on my feet before the thought had finished forming.

I dragged on the first clothes my hands found, last night’s shirt, trousers and boots, faster than I had armored myself before any battle, and threw open the door. Then I followed the only thing in either world I trusted completely.

The pull of my anchor.

It had been there since the very first day in a foreign land. That strange, invisible thread strung taut between us, and it had only grown since I claimed her, stronger with every passing night. Until the point where I could close my eyes and feel exactly where in the world she was. Like a compass needle swinging always, inevitably, toward her. I followed it now at a near run, through the freshly polished halls and down sweeping staircases. Past startled servants who flattened themselves against the walls as their king tore past them with his shirt half-laced and his heart in his throat.

The thread pulled me toward the eastern side of the castle.

Toward the gardens.

And then I heard it, drifting in through an open window, and every frantic, panicked thing in me stopped.

Her laughter.

Bright and unguarded and gloriously alive, ringing up from the grounds below. The relief that crashed through me was so total it nearly took my knees out from under me. I had to brace one hand against the cold stone of the window frame and do nothing but breathe. My heart slammed itself back down out of my throat and into its proper place, while I called myself ten kinds of fool.