Page 135

It seemed like an obvious way to find the truth.

But did Iwantto find it?

I immediately knew the answer to that question:No. I felt like a coward…but I wasn’t sure my heart could take being wrong about the feelings I’d started to develop for the man standing before me.

My pulse pounded as I braced a hand against the doorframe.

You trust him?

Truly?

“Come inside,” Aleksander said. “Let’s talk about this. Please.”

I shook my head. I wanted to run. I wanted to stay. I couldn’t get my feet to move in either direction.

“Let’s talk elsewhere, then. Wherever you want to go, I’ll go.”

“What should we talk about?” I asked, voice wavering a little. “The way nothing between us makes sense? The way we’ve both been manipulated so badly that we have no hope of knowing who or what to trust?” I managed a step into his room. Probably against my better judgment…but the hall seemed too open, too exposed for all the things I needed to say. “How about the wayyou would never—could never—chooseme over your duty to your own kingdom?”

“You don’t think I would choose you?” he asked, quietly.

“Everyone here would disagree with that choice, even if you did. This entire palace has done nothing except warn me about you since we arrived. And Zayn has done the same to you, right? I’ve seen the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not paying attention. He doesn’t trustmeany more than my palace trustsyou.”

He didn’t deny it.

“And maybe they all have a point. We’re wrong for each other. All wrong. What hope is there for balance, honestly? With every new thing I learn about our worlds and their history, it feels all the more impossible. Youfeel impossible.Wefeel impossible.”

Again, he said nothing in his defense.

We stood without speaking for a long moment. That thread binding us together seemed to shake with uncertainty, keeping rhythm with my unsteady heart, twisting and tightening one moment, starting to fray in the next.

Please don’t break,I thought, desperately.

All the things I’d wanted to tell him, all the important, world-shattering, war-related things Ineededto talk to him about…none of those things mattered to me just then.

Because, suddenly, all I could think about washim.

All I needed to know was where we went from here—how we could possibly bridge the valleys of hurt and mistrust between us to keep going, to keep bringing life to places where none had any right to bloom.

I could handle things on my own. I knew how to be alone; I’d spent my entire life doing it. But, for perhaps the first time in my life, I didn’twantto face the future alone.

I wanted to face it with him.

I just didn’t see how I could.

Voice breaking a little more, I said, “You let me go last night. You left me alone.”

“I did.”

“Because it was for the best.”

“Yes. It was.”

I steeled myself for another rejection.

“But I regret it,” he said.

My breath hitched. I was certain I’d misheard him. Then he said it again, in a voice clenched tight with emotion—