Page 87 of Evermore (The Never Sky #3)
“You’re not asking. I’m offering.” I gripped his hands tighter, willing him to understand. “This is about more than us now. It’s about protecting the kingdom, protecting Quill, protecting ourselves from whatever Ezra is planning. And if taking the throne is what we need to do…”
“Then we’ll do it together,” he finished, the ghost of a smile touching his lips.
I nodded, relief flooding through me. “Together. Because if I am queen, he can’t touch me either.”
Thorne’s hand came to rest on my shoulder, his touch both a comfort and a question.
I turned to him, seeing the struggle in his eyes, the conflict between what he wanted for himself and what he knew was necessary.
Between the selfish desire that had driven him for millennia and the love that had taught him to let go. “Are you sure about this?”
I met his gaze, letting him see the certainty in mine. “I’m sure. This is my choice, Thorne. Not destiny, not prophecy, not gods playing games with my life. Mine.”
He held my gaze for a long moment, searching for something in my eyes.
Whatever he found there must have satisfied him, because he nodded, but I didn’t miss the swallow.
The set of his jaw. The evisceration of his heart.
“Then I will take the memories of anyone that ever believed we were married.” He forced in a breath. “I will help you now and always.”
In that moment, I witnessed the breaking of a god.
It wasn’t loud or violent, no power surged, no shadows rose, no ground trembled beneath us.
It was quiet, devastating in its silence.
A supernova collapsing in on itself, leaving only dust where a star had once burned.
His eyes, those ancient, beautiful eyes that had watched civilizations rise and fall, that had witnessed the birth and death of entire worlds, dimmed.
Not all at once, but like a candle slowly drowning in its own wax, the flame guttering, fighting to stay alive even as it died.
For a heartbeat, he let the mask slip. Let me see the full measure of what my choice was costing him.
A thousand lives. A thousand times we’d found love, only to watch it end in blood and pain.
A thousand lives he’d found me, won me, lost me.
And now, in this one, the one he’d claimed mattered most, he would stand aside and watch me marry another.
Would help make it happen with his own hands.
His hand trembled almost imperceptibly where it rested on my shoulder, the only outward sign of the cataclysm happening within him.
But through that small point of contact, I felt everything, grief so profound it had no bottom, love so vast it had no horizon, and beneath it all, a terrible, beautiful acceptance.
The cost of letting go.
I wanted to say something, anything, to ease the necessary pain. But what words could possibly bridge this chasm? What comfort could I offer when I was the source of his agony? When I was bathing in it myself and couldn’t show an ounce of that.
Levanya appeared beside him, staring into his face as she whispered, It is your nature to break his heart. As it is his to let you.
Before I could respond, Thorne straightened, the mask sliding back into place with such smooth precision I might have imagined its absence. But I knew what I’d seen. Knew what he’d allowed me to see.
“We should go,” he said, his voice steady, his hand falling away from my shoulder. The absence of his touch left me cold in a way that had nothing to do with the night air. “Dawn will break soon, and we have to be quick.”
As we made our way through the devastated streets, I couldn’t stop myself from glancing back at him. He walked a few paces behind us, close enough to help if needed, far enough to give us space. His face was composed, serene even, revealed in brief flashes as we passed beneath streetlamps.
But once, when he thought I wasn’t looking, I caught a glimpse of him in shadow. His eyes closed, his head bowed, one hand pressed against his chest as if trying to hold together something that was already shattered beyond repair.
In that moment, I understood with terrible clarity what true sacrifice looked like.
Not the grand gestures of legends, not the battlefield deaths of heroes, but this, a man who had loved me across lifetimes, choosing to let me go.
Choosing my happiness, my freedom, my choice over his own heart’s deepest desire.
I turned away, unable to bear witness to such naked grief when my own eyes burned with unshed tears. Levanya’s voice echoed in my mind, softer now, almost gentle. This, too, is love. The kind that sets free what it most wishes to keep.
Ahead of me now, Archer limped onward, seemingly unaware of the silent breaking happening behind him. Unaware that with every step we took toward our future together, we were walking away from a love story that had spanned millennia.
I swallowed hard against the knot in my throat and kept moving forward, carrying the weight of what I’d seen, a god’s heart crumbling to dust. Some wounds never truly heal. They just become part of who we are, scars we carry beneath our skin where no one else can see them.