“You are once again chasing ghosts,” she murmured.
It was all she had to say to earn her space. He said no more as he disappeared down the hall.
When his sunken shoulders cleared her line of sight, two jade eyes blinked at the end of the hall as his head tilted toward the study to his right. She glanced behind her, ensuring no one else waited for her attention before slipping into the dim room, teeming with old maps her father liked to catalog in his spare time.
Lunelle’s heart beat quickly, and she was unsure if she should feel guilty or not.
She was caught in a strange middle ground between two futures, neither more likely than the other. Mirquios leaned against the desk in the center of the room, the pale wood stained with oil paint—another relic of her father’s time.
She cradled her arms around her ribs, hoping to contain the wildness spiraling within her.
He sighed. “You’re so far away.”
Lunelle glanced down at the space between them, only a few breaths apart, the relief from the Tether no longer stretching over the palace enough for her. Her lips parted to contradict him, but he clarified first.
“In here,” he said, reaching his finger between them and tapping her forehead.
“Oh,” she sighed. “I suppose you saw Arcas in the hallway.”
Mirquos held up a hand, shaking his head.
“I’ve told you before. You owe menoexplanations, Lunelle.”
She stepped forward, his legs parting to accommodate her.
“But I do, don’t I? If we figure out this whole awful mess, if you and I get a chance… you would want to know, wouldn’t you?”
Mirquios inhaled slowly, watching her with those kind eyes, always seeing too much.
“You have an affinity for him.” He was not asking.
Lunelle’s cheeks warmed. “I… I truly am not sure most days, Mirquios.”
He reached for her face, her perfectly lovely face, tainted by the shades of gray in her heart.
“Romance was never a priority for me, Lunelle. I watched Tethers do more harm than good in most relationships I grew up near. Among the Mercurian nobility, marriages are political. They’re strategic. Tethers are… troublesome. My own mother was wed to my father despite a Tether to a merchant from Saturn. She lived a life of luxury, but she was never once content. There was no love there, no joy. Her heart lived four courts away, and I watched it eat her alive for decades, so I never held much stock in the concept as a whole. I was perfectly content to fake my way through a marriage with your sister if it meant progressing the rebellion forward, because my ideals around love and marriage and commitment had been so poorly honed.”
Lunelle leaned away from him, unsure of where he was going as his gaze moved from a painting on the wall to her eyes.
He laughed gently. “And then you shattered every concept I’ve ever had about any of it. About anything at all.”
Her nose scrunched as she absorbed what he was trying to say, what he had not been able to say without the smallest bit of hope before.
“What I am trying to get at, Lunelle, is that this,” he gestured to the space between them, the invisiblethingthat they could not deny even if they wanted to. “This is much bigger than any of it. Any of the rules we think we are bound by. You and I… we are bound by Soul and light, nothing else can come close to the intimacy of being formed for one another. Nothing could break it. But it does not mean you do not have desires that extend beyond it.”
“I do not?—”
“I am genuine, Lunelle, when I say that Iseeyou. I see a woman who sets her own desires so far back in her mind that she doesn’t even know they exist. But if you wanted more—if you wanted him in some capacity, I would never deny you.”
Lunelle was quiet for a long moment, her head swirling as she reached for anything to say that made sense. She left him far too long, his lips dropping into a confused frown.
“…and I just wanted you… to… know that?”
All of her uncertainty, all of the implications his thoughts created, bubbled up from her in a soft giggle.
“So you’re telling me that you’resoenamored with me, you would wholeheartedly allow me to be with a man who may as well be our enemy?”
Mirquios huffed a laugh, circling her hips with his hands.
