I bit back a cry. Kyven’s brow knitted, his eyes filling with something like regret. Or maybe resolve. He laid a finger across his lips, then pointed to himself and out toward the room.
Terror crashed over me like a breaking wave. No. No, fuck that. I might’ve agreed to let him go, but who cared what I’d said? I wouldn’t hide here while Kyven had the life choked from him. While blood vessels burst in his eyes and all his teasing—his arrogance and half smiles—winked out of existence forever.
He levered himself over me, but I clamped my arms around him, then my legs, trapping him as he tried to wriggle free.
We struggled in silence, but I refused to let go. I didn’t care what I had to do, who I had to stab. How much of Zephyrine’s magic I had to borrow to ensure he walked out of here alive. I would do anything, I would?—
“Coraline,” Olivian growled. “You’ve been dogging me all day, so you might as well show your face. I’m not leaving until you do.”
I froze. So did Kyven. We stared at each other as realization dawned.
Sweet Zephyrine, the seneschal wasn’t talking tous. He was addressing his dead wife.
The bed frame shuddered as a heavy weight settled atop the mattress.
The spasm in my chest eased, if only by half. I pictured Olivian hunched above us, his brows lowered as he waited for a ghost.
“Ah,” he said, at length. “There you are.”
I frowned. His voice had changed. I hardly even recognized it, full of tenderness as it was.
“You’re so beautiful. I always forget how much.” He laughed—a strange, crooked sound, and... Goddess, he’d gone mad. Well and truly mad.
What followed was the most bizarre conversation I’d ever been privy to. Olivian seemed to fracture into two people, first praising his wife, then scolding her. He professed his love in one moment, and in the next, railed at the Lady for asking him to release Amryssa into the marsh.
“You can’t have her,” he shouted. “I won’t hear of it, so you might as well stop asking. Our daughter’s place is here, now. You made that choice. We both did.”
Now. The word caught in my mind and held. What did that mean? Had Amryssa’s place been somewhere else, once?
Olivian went on, spewing love and fury, the line between the two growing increasingly blurred. The whole time, Kyven and I stayed still as stones.
At last, the invective wound down. When Olivian finally stood, he did it in stages, as if he’d aged a decade in the last twenty minutes.
“I love you,” he told the empty room. “And hate you. And gods among us, how I wish you hadn’t left me.”
His footsteps receded. Hinges creaked. The key clinked in the door.
I blew out a mile-long breath. The seneschal had locked us in, but Kyven could always use the picks from this side. Olivian had also left a lamp burning, but considering what I’d just heard, Idoubted he was in a frame of mind to realize, much less return to rectify his mistake.
“You can get off me now,” I said.
Kyven didn’t budge. He just lay atop me, much as he had on our wedding night.
“I could.” His half smile resurfaced. “But ‘can’ and ‘want to’ are two vastly different things.”
I studied him. Gods, I was already getting annoyed again. Mostly because if I didn’t, I’d get unreasonably turned on by the press of his hips against mine. “Okay. Iwantyou to get off. How’s that?”
“How badly?” he crooned.
I narrowed my eyes.
“As badly as you wanted to stop me from going out there?” he continued. “As badly as you wanted to keep the seneschal from killing me? Because, for someone who professes to hate me, you seemed awfully invested in my survival.”
I considered that, then reached up to cradle his stubbled cheeks. “The only reason I wanted to keep Olivian from killing you,” I said sweetly, “was so I could do it myself.”
He blinked, then broke into a smile. “Gods, lioness. You’re a terrible liar. The absolute worst.”
I was. I really was. And we both knew it, but that didn’t stop me from bucking hard enough to dislodge him. He rolled aside with a sound that was half chuckle, half groan.
