Page 89 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)

I jerked away. “Don’t,” I said, fumbling with my shirt, trying to turn it right-side out. I regretted snapping at him almost immediately, but the terror I felt was turning to anger—anger that he could be so cavalier about what we were doing—the path we were prepared to walk.

He took my shirt and deftly turned it right-side out, handing it back to me.

I pulled it over my head and stood, searching the cave floor for my pants, my boots.

“Talk to me, Sera. Tell me what you’re thinking that’s made you so ill at ease suddenly.”

I looked up at him dumbfounded. He looked so relaxed, so full of some hope and optimism that had no place in our situation.

I was becoming wound like a spring, imagining that Aben and Britaxia would reach Orin soon. Behr would call his armies back from Windemere. Even if he didn’t turn them on Darkwatch—on his own brother—my people would be left at the mercy of Penjan.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out some of the anxiety I felt.

His hands on my face surprised me. I opened my eyes. “Talk to me, my love,” he said. I felt the whisper of his breath against my lips.

I shook my head. “I…I cannot be your love, Io. I cannot go to Darkwatch with you, and you know this.”

He took a deep breath, looking at me as though I was being ridiculous.

I clenched my jaw and pushed back from him. “I won’t go, Io,” I said. “If you won’t take me to Orin, I’ll climb down from this fucking mountain myself and find someone who will.”

“Sera—”

“No,” I said, cutting him off. My anger was suddenly a wild thing in my chest. "This,” I said, gesturing around and between us, “—is a really beautiful dream...but that’s all it is.

Did you plan to send a bird and say, ‘I'm sorry, brother.

Please forgive me for stealing your bride, and if it's not too much trouble can you still send your armies to her kingdom?’"

He looked down at me, expression neutral, but I noticed his jaw was tight.

He didn’t answer, though, so I went on, my words shrill and panicked. "We will start another war, Io. And lose the one I’m already fighting."

"There will not be another war, Sera.”

“How can you say that? Even Aben is worried about what Behr will do. I saw it myself.”

“You have to trust me.”

I shook my head. “I won’t go,” I said.

“You will go,” he replied matter-of-factly. I thought I saw something dark moving in the depths of his black eyes.

His tone and the words infuriated me. “Do you plan to drag me there?”

“If I have to,” he said, cocking a brow.

I shook my head, teeth grinding together.

“And then what? We hide in Darkwatch while Penjan destroys my kingdom? I certainly don’t have the men to defend it.

I might have thirty thousand with all the fyrds combined, Io.

Do you even have that many dragon riders?

Against a million elves—with wyverns and shadow walkers—those reeking dead soldiers, and who knows what else! "

I was nearly shouting by then. Some part of me felt guilty for that, but I was angry and…desperate for him to give me some small kernel of hope—some reason to let myself believe I could belong with him.

"I never expected you to abandon your people. I told you we will take Windemere back ourselves."

"You do not have enough men!" I cried, exasperated that he seemed not to have heard anything I’d said.

"I will have enough, Sera." He was making an attempt to keep his tone even, but I could see the way the words had come from between his clenched teeth. He was angry at me.

I was not deterred by it. He had no right to his anger.

He was being willfully blind and stupid.

"How?" I demanded. "How will we take back Windemere?

How will you have enough men? Can you truly be hoping your brother will forgive you, and that the lords of Nightfall will allow their armies to march for the queen who broke his betrothal contract? "

He closed his eyes as though he needed to control his temper. "I asked you to trust me, Sera. Why can't you have a little gods damned faith in me?"

His words positively infuriated me. "How can I trust you when you won’t even tell me what your reasons are? If you want me to truly trust you, then tell me your plan—give me some reason why this won't all fall apart around us. Give me a reason to trust you!"

"It's not as simple as that, Sera. But I do have a plan."

"Then fucking tell me!"

"My plan hinges on you getting those fucking cuffs off your wrists."

I looked at him, screwing up my brow. "You can't possibly be placing all your hopes on my magic..."

"No, Sera," he said, sighing. "I am not placing my hopes on your magic. I am placing my hopes on the fact that you are my fucking mate."

"What?" I said, the word, mate, ringing in my ears. "I am not..."

"You are," he growled. He was as angry as I was, I realized. Perhaps even more so. He was just better at hiding it.

"I would know if we were mates, Io. That's kind of a central theme to the whole thing." I wanted to cry as it felt like my search for a reason to hope had just been dashed on the rocks beneath my bare feet. He couldn't possibly have rested all our fates on the idea that we were mates.

It was true that it would’ve made all the difference in the world.

The fae held mating bonds sacred. We would not be expected to part if we were mates.

The idea would be unthinkable. Parting a mated, soul-bonded pair for an extended period of time was a death sentence in all but the most literal sense of the word.

And if we were mates, I would have my army. Chances were all the lords of Nightfall would fight for the mate of their king's brother. I would be family, and all would be forgiven—all would be understood.

But we were not mates. If we were, I would know it with every fiber of my body. I would feel him, sense him, know where he was in every moment.

Erelzeba Adiala had described it by saying it felt like Remeus' soul existed inside her own. The moment she saw him, she recognized it for what it was—because it had been there all along.

"There was not a single moment of doubt that he was my mate,” the elderly Baroness told me as she showed me the swirls and streaks of the mating mark on her palm. Not a single moment of doubt.

I shook my head, tears filling my eyes. “We are not mates, Io.”

"You can't feel it, Sera," he said. The coldness in his tone surprised me.

"You are bound. You can't even feel your own fucking magic.

" He said it like an insult, as though I was responsible for being bound by the necromancer's cuffs. Like I hadn’t fought hard enough against it. That hurt me, very deeply.

I turned and began striding across the chamber, needing to get away from that accusation in his tone. I needed time to think—time to figure out a way off this fucking mountain and begin to clean up the mess I had made—salvage my betrothal…something...

"Where are you going, Sera?" he asked, exasperation replacing some of the coldness.

"I don't know!" I shouted. I stopped and turned to him. "I love you! I love you so much it's making me fucking crazy. I can't think around how much I want you. I can't think of anything but staying with you, and I want it so badly I'm considering letting them all die to have it.

But I don't feel any mating bond, and I don't see how these—" I held up my wrists, "—could get in the way of something soul-deep."

His face changed as I spoke. The anger and frustration bled away until there was regret and something very near appreciation in his expression.

"I know you can't feel it yet, Sera. But I do.

I feel it here." He laid two fingers against his chest and tapped.

"Your heart beats in my chest just as strong as my own. "

He crossed the distance and laid his hand over my heart. "I have never lied to you. Now I need you to trust me. Until you can feel it for yourself, I need you to trust that I know that you are mine."

The words, you are mine, had much the same effect on me as they had the first time he’d said them. Because you are fucking mine, Sera. You belong to me.

Instead of grating on me with their possessiveness, they honored me, sending a wave of fierce satisfaction through me with the honor of what being his meant.

"Tell me what you feel then?" I demanded, my voice sounding as desperate as I felt.

"Tell me how you know?" I wanted so badly to find that kernel of hope. I wanted to believe him.

He smiled. "I knew it that night in the brothel, though I was too blind to see it. When I was leaving you and every part of me told me not to go. I looked back at you, and I had never wanted anything so much."

He ran his hand up my neck and cradled the back of my head, threading his fingers through my hair.

"And then I felt you for the first time.

That night in Albiyn when your throat was cut.

I don't know how I knew—but something told me to run, and I fucking ran.

All the way to that brothel. I found you, your blood nearly spent, so close to death. "

Both of his hands were on my face then, holding me so that I was forced to stare into his dark, stormy eyes. "I knew then, Sera, as I watched you bleed, that the world would not exist for me any longer if you died."

I could hardly believe the depth of his feeling even from the start. His words returned, the ones I had never been sure weren't just a dream. Don't you fucking dare, Sera. If you die, I swear to the gods I will burn this fucking city to ashes.

I remembered thinking he loved me, even then.

"I was never going to give you up, you know," he said, apologetically. "I might have been trying to convince myself that I would take you to Behr. But I was always coming here—always bringing you home to Darkwatch. That’s the only place for you, Sera. At my side."

I looked into his eyes as my heart broke into pieces. I felt the tears track hot down both my cheeks.

"You see, there's the problem, Io. If we are mated, but I’m somehow blocked from it, then how is it that I can feel all the same for you and more. I can’t feel your emotions, of course, but I’ve known you were mine just as definitively, from the moment I put that dagger in your chest and thought it must have gone into my own heart from how much it hurt.

When I smelled your blood—so strangely intoxicating that I wanted to lick it off my hands because it felt like home to me.

You are mine. I have known that from the start.

But there is no mating bond there. The fates have nothing to do with what I feel, and I do not need them to tell me why I feel it. "

He laughed wryly even as I saw the way my words pleased him.

"If not for your commitment to Behr, my darling, sweet Sera, I wouldn't give two shits about what the fates have to say about us. The world needs to know, though. We’ll have the smiths in the citadel remove the cuffs, and then the master scholar will verify the mating bond. When that’s done, you and I can tell the fates to fuck off for the rest of eternity. "

Everything inside me wanted to believe him. It was a physical pain in my chest to feel how much I wanted it to be true. "Well then, let's go," I said. "Let's go and do it now."

He smiled, kissing me deeply.

I leaned into him—into the strength and power and hope radiating off the Lord of Darkwatch like a beacon. I kissed him back, trying desperately to tamp down that voice in my mind that whispered to me that he was wrong.

We were not mates. We were simply Io and Sera. Two people who loved each other so much we were about to let the world burn for it.