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Oh, shit.

My heart started banging all around my chest. I hadn’t even considered the imprint.

“Only a union formed out of love can be blessed.” The wisps of eather slowed in his eyes. “You love him.”

Pressure clamped down on my chest. I didn’t know what to say. My thoughts raced, but nothing my mind spewed provided a way out of this.

“So, tell me something,” he said, that cold bitterness seeping back into his voice. “What are we going to do?”

“I…I don’t know what you mean.”

“With you. My nephew.” He paused, looking down at my hand. “With this.”

I swallowed thickly, the word fuck on a constant loop in my mind.

“Cutting off your hand won’t change how you feel.”

My eyes went wide. Had he seriously considered that?

“So, tell me, what am I to do?”

Acid churned in the pit of my stomach. “I don’t know how this imprint happened. It wasn’t something I decided on,” I said in a rush. “It just appeared.”

“Whether it was a conscious act or not is irrelevant.”

A tremor started deep within me, birthing an icy fear that had little to do with my safety and more to do with Ash’s. The only thing I could think about was the truth—and I thought I could make it work. “I don’t know you.”

He frowned.

“I don’t remember you or…or anything from my past lives, only what I’ve been told,” I continued. “But I know Nyktos. I got to know him. And, yes, I do love him, but…” My chest ached with what I was about to say next. “I’m not in love with him.”

Kolis’s eyes searched mine. “There’s a difference between the two?”

I hesitated, seeing that he truly didn’t know there was. “Yes, there is a whole realm’s worth of difference between the two.”

“Explain,” he demanded.

“It’s hard to put into words—”

“Then think very hard so that putting it into words will not be so difficult.”

“Loving someone isn’t…it isn’t less than being in love. It’s just not as strong or as irrevocable. Loving someone can change,” I rambled, my heart thumping as he listened closely. “It can grow into being in love, and it can fade. Being in love…it doesn’t do that. It only gets stronger, and you would do anything for that person. Anything.” My throat thickened as I thought about the dream I’d had. “Being in love is…it’s unbreakable.”

Kolis fell quiet and looked as if I’d spoken an unfamiliar language to him. Then again, this was the very same person who believed a prisoner could become a companion.

My anxiety ramped up. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a cliff, my toes curling into the abyss. I had a plan to free Ash, and I knew what it would take to carry it out.

Breathing shallowly, I counted. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Hold. And as I did, I shut it down. All of it. My concern. The fear. My rage. Everything. Just as I’d done so many times during my life until Ash.

Doing so now caused a suffocating sense of sorrow to settle in my throat and chest, but it had then, too. I breathed past it, though. I shut it all down as I exhaled, even my awareness of Sotoria, breathing long and slow as I became nothing.

An empty vessel once more.

A blank canvas down to my bones, suitable and ready to become whoever I needed to be. Strong but hollow, and whatever Kolis wanted me to be.

The racing of my heart slowed. The trembling ceased. The embers quelled. I was just like his smile. Learned but hollow. “If…if you don’t know the difference between the two, then how can you claim to love me?”

Kolis sucked in a sharp breath, dropping my wrist as if I’d burned him. He rose, his movements shaky. “I love you—” His eyes shut, his large shoulders tensing. “I’m in love with you.”