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Chapter Twelve: Nox

“It’s been two fucking days,” I murmur to the healer, the green light of his magic glowing over Rhea’s forehead. I try to keep my frustration—my terror— in check, but with each hour that passes, with each moment that she hasn’t so much as wiggled a finger, it’s becoming harder to rein myself in.

This is all my fucking fault. I should have been honest with her so much sooner. I tried to rationalize with myself that prolonging the full truth until we were back in my kingdom—far enough away from King Dolian—meant she would have the safety and space to process it however she needed to. That she would be able to see with her own eyes what I was trying to protect.

When I thought about all the scenarios that could have unfolded when Rhea found out I was the crown prince of the Mage Kingdom, none of them had accurately portrayed how terribly it would go. Of course, there was no version I thought of where Councilman Osiris was the one to tell her. I didn’t see that one coming at all. But a part of me knows that I was also delaying it because I was a coward. I was too afraid that, when she learned about my involvement with Alexi’s death, it would be too much. She wouldn’t be able to look at me in the same way after that.

Your words mean nothing to me now.

I didn’t know what true heartbreak was until that moment, when her red-rimmed eyes met my own and I saw in them the depths to which I had just destroyed her. I have never seen her angry like that—not even on the night that she thought I was making fun of her and kicked me out of the tower. I brought that out in her.

The last thing I ever wanted was to make her hurt. To be another person who failed her. Another reason for her to bottle her feelings up because sharing them proved to be too dangerous. Lying to her this entire time felt like forced suffocation—I hated it. And the longer she lays here motionless, those perfect green eyes remaining hidden behind closed lids, the further my heart is pummeled.

“She is uninjured and by all accounts healthy, Your Highness,” Galen, the palace healer, says as he lifts his hands from her head and his magic flickers out in his palms.

My magic pushes hard beneath my skin, filling me to the brim until I snap, “Then why isn’t she waking up?” Galen startles at my outburst, his dark gray eyes widening. I draw a hand down my face as I blow out a breath before continuing, “I’m sorry, Galen. I don’t understand why we can’t get her to respond. It’s been two days.”

“Tell me again what happened,” Galen says as he slowly strides over to the chair placed at the corner of the bed in my room.

My gaze leaves his and goes back to her—always to her. Her hair is braided into a thick plait that drapes down over her shoulder, Sarai having done so after she washed Rhea with a warm cloth. While I would only go as far as the sitting room, I did give my mother’s lady-in-waiting the privacy to carefully clean and change Rhea from her travel-worn clothes into a pink silk robe.

Drawing in more air, I answer, “We were practicing using her magic. She hasn’t had much training with it, and she just passed out after expelling some.” It is a bald-faced lie, but I don’t care. When it comes to Rhea’s safety, there are only five people I trust with the truth of who she is and what she can do: my parents, my sister, my best friend, and myself. Though a lie, it encompasses enough of the truth that Galen should be able to heal whatever is wrong with Rhea.

“It is possible that without the proper training, she likely used too much too quickly, and her body is now recovering. Give her time, Your Highness. She just appears to be resting. Let her do so.”

I force a smile to my face as I nod. “Thank you, Galen.”

The old mage dips his chin, then stands and walks to the door, closing it quietly behind him. I get up from my own chair and stretch my arms overhead before interlacing my fingers behind my head.

It’s been two days.

My eyes catch on the dead plants in the corners of the sitting room just beyond, and a shudder rolls through me. The memory of the moment I watched them wilt, life drawn from them in mere seconds, ripples to the forefront of my mind.

Your words mean nothing to me now.

She had screamed that at me from where she knelt on the floor, and like the lighting of a candle, something within her had ignited. But it wasn’t warm nor was it light. It was power—raw, unfiltered power—that turned her eyes completely black. Then the screaming started. The sound was so tortured that I thought I might die right there. I saw her magic begin to light her palm, but it wasn’t that brilliant, beautiful, luminescent white I was used to. Glittering black shadows balled larger and larger in her hands, and I barely had time to throw my own magic up as a shield when it burst from her palms.

Despite my magical strength, I had nearly faltered under the weight of her power. I watched through a grimace as the plants in my room went from vibrant green to deathly black within seconds. Then she collapsed, her magic gone like a puff of smoke. I crawled to her, my hands shaking as I tried to wake her, but her skin was wan, her lips so fucking pale, and she was silent. I would take her anger and her hatred of me over that numbing silence.

This newfound quiet is soul-shatteringly unbearable.

That wasn’t the first time her eyes had turned black, and it wasn’t the first time that she had drawn out the life of a living thing. I’m not sure how the hell I’m supposed to broach that subject with her.

A knock sounds at my door. Crossing the distance from the bedroom to the sitting room, I crack it open enough for me to glimpse who is there. My shoulders relax when I see it’s my father.

His voice is low and filled with concern as he walks in and asks, “How is she?”

The powerful outburst of both of our magic had drawn the attention of those in the palace, including my parents who had rushed into my room a few moments after Rhea collapsed. The entire evening was chaotic between my parents coming up with a reason for the expulsion of magic to give to the council and my insistence that only Galen and Sarai be allowed to tend to Rhea.

“She is the same,” I croak out, my hand running through my hair and holding the strands there. My father stands next to me—not quite shoulder to shoulder—and folds his arms over his chest.

“What did Galen say?”

“That she is healthy. That she expelled too much magic and needs to continue resting.” My gut sinks at the idea that she could be like this for a while, that she could wake up somehow different. Or maybe my fear is that she will wake up the same—falling apart into pieces because of me.

“Son, I can see the worry on your face. What do you think?”

“It’s my fault,” I rasp, allowing emotion to seep out for the first time since I confessed everything to Rhea. “My secrets did this to her—brought her anger to the surface and caused her magic to explode from her too quickly.” I didn’t have a chance yet to tell my father all about who Rhea is to me—who we are to each other. How I’d walk away from everything if she asked me to. I’d burn entire worlds down—starting with the Mortal Realm and its bastard king—with only a whisper of command from her lips. She wouldn’t ask me to do those things. It wasn’t in her nature to, but gods, did I fucking want to. There is something primitive inside of me that sings in approval at the thought—my magic hooking onto the idea that I could end any person who even thinks about harming her.

“I can feel your magic surging,” my father says, his hand coming to grip my shoulder. “Breathe, Nox.” Together, we inhale deeply and hold it there for a few seconds before slowly blowing the breath back out. “You haven’t lost control like that in a long while.” He surveys me, his fatherly intuition seeing more than eyes ever could.

He moves to sit on one couch, and I take the other, able to see Rhea in my bed from where I’m seated. The need to be closer to her is ever-present—never once dulling in the three months we’ve gotten to know each other. I thought I loved my kingdom and my family to my fullest potential, but then I felt what it was to love her , to be loved by her, and it changed me. A well deeper than any I had felt before was open within me, and all I wanted to do was fill it with everything made of her.

My father crosses an ankle over his knee as he leans back on the couch. “Did I ever tell you about the time your mother stabbed me?”

I jerk my head back in surprise, making him chuckle. “What? Never.”

His smile is wide as he settles in a little more, like he’s preparing for a great retelling. “Of course, you know that my marriage to your mother was arranged—”

“Yes, and you were enraptured from the start,” I interrupt, folding my arms over my chest. My parents’ love story is one that’s been told over and over since my childhood.

“We were lucky to have found a lot of commonality at first with each other, especially for a pair of hormonal teenagers. But that doesn’t mean that our relationship wasn’t without faults or that we didn’t have to suffer through trial by fire to figure things out.”

“Did you ever lie to her about who you were though?”

He barks out a laugh, making me raise a brow in question. “No. I did not do that, but I did lie to her in an attempt to push her away.”

Entirely confused, I stare at him, gesturing with my hand for him to continue.

“Your mother has grown into her role as queen of the Mage Kingdom, and she has done so beautifully. You cannot tell me that there is anyone else out there more fit to stand beside me, to help me lead and make decisions. But this was not always the case. When we were younger, she was a soft, free spirit. She hated the politics of court and of posturing to gain the approval of old men that only cared whether or not she could give the kingdom a strong heir.”

He tilts his head up towards the ceiling, smiling as he reminisces.

“We had been officially courting for two years, following all the guidelines and rules put in place for an heir apparent and their betrothed. Everything was planned and laid out ahead of time—where we ate, what we wore, even our conversation topics. We may have been attracted to each other, but it wasn’t a natural falling together. It wasn’t built on the right experiences. It was a facade of sorts. Which meant that, when things started to get difficult, there wasn’t a strong enough foundation to hold us to each other.”

I contemplate his words as I look over at Rhea. Her face is a mask of calm, her coloring more like its normal glow today. Sunshine. She truly is the embodiment of the sun—warm, radiating, and life-giving.

“I was serious about my duties as the crown prince, and Alexandria was a distraction from those things. A beautiful and easy-to-fall-for distraction,” he recalls.

“So what happened?” My gaze lingers on her for a moment longer before I finally pull it away and look at my father.

“There was a formal dinner and ball to be held in our honor, and your mother, gods, was counting down the days with absolute dread. She didn’t want the eyes of everyone on her. She didn’t like the way her father basically confined her to only their home and schooling, lest she accidentally embarrass him with her ‘wildness.’”

I didn’t know my grandfather on my mother’s side, as he passed shortly after I was born, but I hate the idea that anyone would try to confine her in that way.

“I could see how stressed she was. How every time we were forced to parade around the kingdom together, she became less and less present. I couldn’t watch her deteriorate like that. My attraction to her had morphed into something else—something deeper—but for her, she was so lost in the burden of what it meant to be married to the crown prince that I thought she didn’t feel anything for me besides what was necessary for appearances. I knew it wasn’t fair to her, what she was being turned into. What she was giving up. So I concocted a plan. I would make her hate me, and I would pretend to hate her, so that our impending marriage would look too tumultuous, too unstable to continue in the eyes of the council, and she would be free.”

“That’s an embarrassingly stupid plan.”

His laugh is light, coaxing a small chuckle of my own. “Love makes you do stupid things sometimes. And lack of experience. I had both of those going for me and thought I knew the answers. So I spent the months leading up to the dinner being a complete asshole to her.”

“And so she stabbed you in anger?” I ask, trying to picture my mother angry enough to do so.

“No,” he replies softly. I tilt my head as I look at him, watching as his smile slowly drops and the corners of his mouth tip into a frown. “She was devastated. It wasn’t in her nature to interrogate me, to force me to explain why I had begun to push her away, but I saw it. Every time she looked at me with a spark of hope in her gray eyes and every time I snuffed it out with my actions, it nicked away a piece of my heart. And hers.”

I swallow roughly, unable to help the way my fingers twitch with the need to hold Rhea’s.

“It was the evening before the dinner, and we were both in a space of devastation. I knew that if I didn’t do something with all the pent-up energy and anxiety flowing through me, I’d make a dumb decision. So I walked to the training grounds and began throwing daggers to blow off steam. Your mother found me there.”

My father uncrosses his legs and stretches them out before him. The room is quiet as he thinks, only the sounds of my guilty heart beating in my ears competing with the rise and fall of Rhea’s steady breathing in the bedroom.

“She was furious. She begged me to tell her what was really going on. I tried to ignore her and the way I felt like I was going to vomit at the thought of never getting to be with her again. She grabbed a dagger off of the table and walked up to me—more passion and anger than I had ever seen from her before. She told me that if I was truly done with her, I’d better stab her in her heart right now because it would hurt less than watching me pretend to be something I wasn’t.”

“Gods.” I huff out a breath.

“I laughed at her, at the ridiculous picture she had painted with her fury. And then the tears started flowing down her cheeks and she told me that she loved me. It was the first time either of us had said it, and the moment she did, I knew I couldn’t lie anymore about how she was the very air my lungs needed. I rushed to her, pulling her body to mine and kissing her with every ounce of emotion I could. But because I was an idiot, I completely ignored the very sharp dagger she still had pointed at me until it became embedded in my stomach.”

An actual hearty laugh scrapes up my throat as I gape at him. “So you stabbed yourself?”

He waves his hand in front of him as he says, “Semantics. From that night forward, we were inseparable. When I became king, I asked the council to change the rules—both for her and for our children. So you would have the choice to lead the sort of life you wanted without the parameters set in place by people who truly should have no opinion on what you do.”

“It’s a good story,” I reply, leaning my head back on the couch as I stare out the window in front of me into the forest beyond. “But I don’t see how it relates to what I’ve done.”

“Ah, my son, so focused on the bigger picture that you forget the smaller details.”

“Like how you forgot the dagger?” I tease, bringing my gaze back to his.

He laughs, nodding his head in agreement before resting his hands over his crossed knee. “Precisely. I thought I knew what I was doing, and I made the wrong call. It was a painful lesson to learn, but in the end, it was worth it. Do you know why?” When I’m silent, unable to see what he’s trying to show me, he jerks his chin towards Rhea. “Do you love her?”

“Yes,” I answer without hesitation.

My father nods, the look on his face one of genuine knowing. “You do not fall in love with someone only because they make grand gestures or declarations of that love. It’s the smaller, more intimate moments that are woven throughout your time together that make your love grow stronger—that build that foundation. That’s what I learned with your mother. When we started being completely honest with each other, our foundation became unshakable.” He’s pensive, his gaze lost in memory when he continues. “In the same vein, it is not merely one large moment that usually breaks a couple. It is repeated small ones and lessons not learned that can crack the love you’ve built.”

“Dad, I was—I did something awful to her. Someone she cared about died because of me. She is in this state because of me . How can we come back from that?” I drop my gaze to my lap, shame and misery coating me.

My father stands and walks to me, his fingers finding my chin and lifting my head up to meet his softened gaze. “When you are in the throes of love, it’s easier to be brave. To find courage. To hold strong. But like all things, there is a balance, and sometimes, being in love can drive us to be more fearful. To hold too tightly to the point that we aren’t holding on anymore to protect that love, but instead, we are suffocating it. In those moments, we see that love can cost all that we are and all that we will ever be. But it’s also only the honesty of love that has the power to set us free. Because where there is love, there is acceptance and understanding.” His smile is tender as he drops his hand back to his side and adds with a small shrug, “Where love shines, forgiveness can bloom.”