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“Maybe not,” he relented. “But love gets in the way of better judgment. And even if he wouldn’t deceive you like this, Varlett would. I always knew there was something she hid from me, butnever could have guessed it was this.”

“Why did you think that I left you for War so quickly? You assumed it without question.”

Hel’s upper lip curled, and she could see he was about to fire off an answer but then he paused, took a breath. “One of my servants, a trusted one who’d been with me for centuries, told me he saw you kiss War. Weeks before you left. He said you’d been sneaking around talking in the shadows behind my back. So, I watched every interaction with suspicion, but I couldn’t fathom it until he said he saw you in War’s arms as he carried you away, and I couldn’t find you anywhere. He suspected you’d planned to leave for a while. I didn’t believe it until I found you at War’s house in Ryvengaard.”

“Who was the servant?” Valeen snapped.

“O’Ryan.”

Valeen sneered. “Thedragonshifter O’Ryan. Who would take orders from his dragon princess over you.” It all started to make sense. “I still don’t understand what motive she would have; all this because War loved me and not her?”

“There’s probably more to it, but I’m sure that was part of it.”

“But Varlett lovesyou. Not War. I saw it on her face in the tower.”

Hel was quiet for a moment and then said, “Varlett doesn’t love me. She loves what I can give her.”

“And that is?”

“Power a dragon could never have on her own even with a demon prince’s ring. Do you know how much stronger she grew just being around me, learning from the god of magic? She told me once she always thought she should have been born a goddess. She asked me to make her immortal. Even if I could, I wouldn’t have.” He paused. “I thought our fight before I went to sleep was her jealousy of you, and maybe it was in part, but if she did all this, it was more than that. You threaten her power more than anyone, and the only reason she didn’t kill you was because she knows you’re the key to opening the way back to Runevale.”

Valeen thought about what Varlett told her in her cottage in the mountains.“You know what he cared about more than me? His power. And you know what I cared about more than him?Mine.”This wasn’t about love at all, it was all about power.

“Do you believe me?” Hel asked. There was a desperation in his beautiful face she’d rarely seen.

It would be convenient to be able to blame everything on Varlett, and even if they had this discussion all those years before, she wouldn’t have believed him. It was too raw, too real, but time had softened her to Hel again. Time had given them the gift of chances, but what convinced her the most was Varlett’s stipulation of silence. There were too many coincidences for it not to be true.

At her hesitation, he dropped to his knees.

Broken.

Shattered.

Never had she seen him this desperate, not even last time. Before he’d been angry. Now he was groveling. A tear slipped down his cheek; his fingertips clasped his thighs indenting the fabric. His face was a beautiful mess of anguish. “I will beg. I will do anything you ask. After everything I’ve done, how I treated you, I know you shouldn’t trust me, but I swear I didn’t betray you. I have only ever loved you. I love you still.”

“Stop.” Her chin quivered.

“I’ll drink any serum. I’ll let you into my mind to hear my every thought. I will do anything to prove that never happened. Fuck, Valeen, if you won’t believe me, then just kill me. End me right now.”

I do believe you.

Hel was in front of her, gripping her face between his palms. Longing and fear warred on his striking features. “I don’t care about anything that happened anymore. If this life has shown me anything at all, it’s that you are the reason I breathe. I live in an eternal midnight, and you are my moon giving me light in darkness. I have no heart unless it’s in your hands, Valeen.”

“Hel,” she breathed.

“Let me finish. I am desperately sorry for everything I did to you in Adalon and before. I was wrong. And the truth is you shouldn’t forgive me. You should despise me for the rest of forever, and I would rather burn in the agony of your hatred than feel nothing at all but love me or hate me, I can never let you go. I won’t. I will always fight for you. I never told you this, but the one time I prayed to the All Mother for mercy, to help me find warmth in my endless winter, the next day you came to my Uncle Balneir’s party. She gave meyou.”

Her chest throbbed, and tears spilled down her cheeks. It was hard—impossible not to give into him right there, to press her lips to his and love him with every part of her body that had been denied her for so long.

She did love him. Once the tormentor of her soul and now the possessor of it.

Maybe through it all, she never stopped loving him. Even if a dragon sorceress or wars or jealousies wanted to pull them apart, as fate had decided, their souls would always call for the other.

Presco once told her that a soul match could be your best friend, someone you’re drawn to, a person you felt you knew for a long time before you ever met, but a soulmate was a love match of two flames that sparked life into the other and burned with the eternal flame. That’s what he was to her.

A part of her still loved War, too. He’d been there for her when she believed Hel had broken her all those years before. He had an easy smile and a warm heart. He carried her when she couldn’t carry herself. He cared more about her than his own feelings, and he’d been patient, kind and loving. He’d saved Layala from herself. Even if the past few months they’d grown apart… “I—” she took a deep breath. “I need time to think.”

“Because you love him,” Hel said. “Val, he sent you away with me.”