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ROYO

CITY OF RAHWAY, YUSAN

A eri and I are back in our room after a weird breakfast. I shake my head from the politics. After all of this, Count Rune wants to keep King Joon on the throne?

I ball my hands in fists. It’s just more of the same. Like that game I used to play as a kid where people switched chairs. Except when it’s royals and nobles, a bunch of innocent people die just so they can change seats.

Aeri stares at me as I prowl by the windows. All the traps are still in place. I checked as soon as we got in to make sure the servants hadn’t touched them. I also swept the room for weapons, hidden traps, and spies.

I shake my head. Maybe Euyn wasn’t paranoid—maybe he just had to deal with people constantly trying to kill him.

New clothes sit on the dresser and hang in the wardrobe, but Sora said not to put on anything before she has a chance to check it.

Apparently, you can poison clothes.

I run my hand down my face. We aren’t safe here. I wanna leave, but we aren’t safe anywhere. At least this place is swank with satins and goosedown. So that’s something.

“You have to be tired,” Aeri says, watching me. She’s over by the dresser, inspecting the new clothes.

I only slept from when she got up at dawn until the tailors knocked at eight, but it’s okay. I can sleep in the Ten Hells.

“I’m fine,” I say.

She’s unsurprised by my reaction. Her eyebrows rise a little, but that’s it.

“Try?”

Her golden eyes plead with me. She looks beautiful in her white dress. Pearls line her long neck. I want to see that neck arch as I…

I shake it off, shoving my hands in my pockets. Doesn’t matter. Maybe I am exhausted if I’m thinking about getting that close to her again. Forgiveness isn’t forgetting. I have forgiven her—I did last night. But I’d have to have no memory to let her hurt me again.

I eye the bed, trying not to think about what I want to do to her. So that’s all I’m thinking about.

Fuck my life.

“You’ll wake me if there’s any sign of trouble?” I ask.

She laughs. “I think you’d notice the room glowing.”

That’s not funny. I turn and stare at her.

She smiles. “Yes, of course I’d wake you, Royo.”

Aeri closes the drapes and lights a candle by the armchairs. She pulls a leather-bound book out of the nightstand and curls up in a seat. She must’ve stolen the novel from Rune’s study, but who knows when she did that? I have a feeling it was while we were all waiting there last night.

Still a little thief.

A time thief.

I lie down and stare at the ceiling. I don’t get how she did it—how she saved me on the Sol—but it explains how I woke up with a splitting headache in the lifeboat.

Aeri’s given up part of her own life to save me, Sora, and Mikail.

Every use of the sands costs her, but she did it anyway.

She was ready to leave the amarth egg, just so I’d live.

If she had to, she’d marry this count to protect all of us.

My stomach turns at the thought, my hands digging into the pillows.

Yeah, he’s got more power and money than I could even dream about.

Yeah, he’s a decent-looking old guy. But she can’t marry him.

He’ll never understand her, never love her.

And if she becomes his wife, I’ll never see her again.

Not to patrol, not to hold her. Nothing.

I bite down on my lip.

“Aeri,” I say.

“Yes?”

I open my mouth, but what do I want to say? Don’t marry one of the most powerful guys in the realm and become queen of Yusan? Live with me in a drafty, smelly shack once this is all over? She’s a princess—she deserves a life of luxury and spoils. There are hopes, and then there are delusions.

I crush the thought with a sigh.

“Wake me up in a couple of bells,” I say.

She looks at me, and a little wrinkle forms on her forehead. She knows it wasn’t what I was gonna ask.

“Sure, Royo,” she says.

Regret floods me, weighing down my chest. Somehow, I know I’ll look back at this moment and wish I’d said what I felt. But the moment’s already gone. I turn over onto my side and close my eyes.