Trent shook his head even as he met my eyes. “I thought you might say that. If it was up to me, I’d choose the hard path with the easy ending, not the easy path with the hard end.”

I drew back. “What do you mean, it’s not up to you?”

Taking a last drink, Trent set his empty glass on the windowsill. Exhaling, he scrubbed his face with a hand, hesitating to look at his five perfect fingers. “What would you choose?”

The fervent emotion in his gaze as his eyes met mine scared me. “Me?”

“I want you to decide,” he said, looking a little unsteady. “Not because it impacts your species, but because I want you there with me.”

My heart pounded. I didn’t know what he meant. He wanted me there with him?

Stumbling slightly, he went to sit on the raised hearth, snagging a new bottle on the way. “If you make the decision, you have to be there to help me with the fallout,” he said, working the corkscrew with a professional flair. “Either they die naturally, or I continue the cure and the twenty-year battle to hide them until they can defend themselves.”

The cork came out with a pop, and he looked at his glass, halfway across the room on the sill.

Shocked, I stared at him. He wanted me to decide? He wanted me . . . to make a decision that he would have to live by?

Giving up, he drank right from the bottle. “I don’t want to be alone anymore, Rachel,” he said. “And if you make the choice, you have to help me see it through.”

“I want them to live,” I said softly, and he slumped, his disgust obvious when his bottle clinked against the floor. “What, you asked my opinion, and that’s it. You’re not going back now that it wasn’t anything you wanted to hear.”

“No.” Trent eyed me sourly. “It would be easier the other way.”

Smirking, I crossed the room and sat down beside him. Taking the bottle he handed me, I poured a swallow in my glass. “If it was easy—”

“Everyone would do it,” he finished, clinking his bottle to my glass and downing a swig.

“What about Ellasbeth?” I said, my expansive mood hesitating.

Trent didn’t look at me. “What about her?”

I thought of the distasteful woman, on a plane to the West Coast right now, but she’d be back, worming her way into elven politics. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting married to her?”

Drawing away, he looked sideways at me. The fire was warm on our backs, and his focus was starting to go distant. “This is a business arrangement. Nothing more.”

“Well, that’s what I thought,” I said quickly, and from behind the curtain, Al started to snore. “But she doesn’t like me.”

“So?”