“I did.” I have regrets. “I appreciate your honesty. I just don’t understand how you can claim you love me when you left me to starve for months.” I swallow hard. “Or how you could race off to help a woman you only know by her vagina—”
“Stop it.”
I see it then. The hard, dark part of him that he tries to keep hidden. It’s not as easy for him to conceal emotions now. There’s too much pain written on his body and in his psyche to ever be that boy on the rooftop again. But he chose this path.
“To help a woman you only know by her vagina,” I repeated, enunciating each syllable like a proper fucking lady. No commoner tells me to stop speaking in that tone. No one tells me to stop speaking at all. Ever again. “But you left me trapped with a monster. Do you know why Bashir was naked when you killed him?”
I glimpsed a quicksilver beat of fear in his eyes. Good. I want him to know the full depth of what he’s done to us.
“Since we’re in the business of honesty this morning.” I held his gaze. “He wanted me to know exactly how much it would hurt when he got out of his cell and raped me.”
No reaction. I kept going.
“Bashir liked to talk to me. Night and day. If I was in that cell, he would stop trying to batter the door open and tell me how he would force me until I was bred, then after I had the baby, he would rip my head off with his bare hands, throw it into the throne room with my father, and keep violating my corpse until it disintegrated—”
“Stop.” Not a command this time. A plea. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, either. I haven’t told anyone. Not Raina. Not Saskaya. No one, until now. I need you to know what you left me to face alone.” I just need to tell someone. He had a hand in making me go through that nightmare, so he can live with the knowledge, too. “I went to the castle to buy time so you could heal. I led the Sentinels to The Walled City so that Raina and the Covari had a chance of getting you to the Temple to recover. I locked myself in with a madman for you.”
“I know.”
“For the first few days we were trapped together, Bashir hunted me down every corridor of the castle. I slept in the dumbwaiter until I felt it moving, and barely made it out before he caught me. Once I captured him in that cell, I could get away from him for a few hours every day. But eventually those hinges were going to give way. I didn’t have much more time when you finally showed up. The only question was how painful my death would be.”
His gaze cuts away from mine.
“I locked myself inside the cell at night because I would rather starve to death than endure what Bashir vowed to do to me.”
Lorcan said nothing.
“We asked a great deal of you, Lorcan. Raina, Saskaya, Tovian, Keryn. All of them, on my behalf. You will always have my gratitude for that.”
“I don’t want your gratitude, Zosia.”
“No, you want to be king.” I scoffed. “That’s what you cared about all along. The princess. Not me.”
My words were a slap in the face. He recoiled.
“That is purebullshit.”
“Is it?” I asked softly, raising one eyebrow. “Didn’t you tell me that to my face? I once asked you what you wanted from life. You said: Save the country. Rescue the princess. Marry her, and live happily ever after.”
His throat moved.
“I used to wonder what it would have been like” —used to, as in, last week; good thing I was never dumb enough to say it out loud— “if I had been born someone else. A village girl here in Tenáho, for example. If we would have had a chance at happiness then. But now I know. Another woman would be the princess, and you would have gone off chasing her instead. It was never me you wanted. Zosia.”
“It’s. Not. True.”
My brows lifted. Waiting. Listening.
“Are you imagining there’s any daylight between who you are and what you are?”
I regarded him warily.
“Zosia. Yes, the fact that you’re the princess is part of it, because it’s part of you. If all I wanted was a princess, I could have dated Raina. I could have been her Prince Consort years ago if a title was all I cared about. I want you. Everything you are. I wanted you in that stupid nightclub you sneaked out to, dancing in a top that left your entire back exposed. I’ve loved you since that morning on your balcony when you were reading about frogs in your nightgown with your bare legs propped on the wall.”
I don’t know what to say. This truth-telling business is more than I bargained for. I cut my gaze to the floor, feeling small and petty in blaming him for Bashir’s violent threats. He didn’t know.
Yet he abandoned me. Everyone does. My mother. My father. Even Cata. She abandoned her own son in the name of duty.
