“Losing you…” He clenched and unclenched his jaw before he let out a sigh. “I never want to be in that situation again, never want you in that situation again, and the only reason we were is because I’m a prince. If I weren’t, none of this would’ve happened, and as long as I’m next in line or on the throne, it may keep happening, and I can’t do it.”

My heart leaped at the implication in his words, but I couldn’t get ahead of myself. “If you weren’t a prince, we never would have met.”

“I know, and I wouldn’t change that for the world.” He grazed my cheek with his knuckles, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. It didn’t quite reach his eyes. “But once we had mated, I could have chosen another path. I could have prevented this.”

I placed my hand over his, bringing it to my lips. I kissed his palm. “You’re not a mystic, my love, and besides, even if you had chosen a different path, the king would still have seen you as a threat, seen me as a threat. Whatever we did, there were always going to be dangers. I knew that when I mated you. But you couldn’t possibly have predicted this happening. Neither of us could.”

“Perhaps not, but now that I am aware of it, I could prevent it in the future.”

“I mean, if your dad is declaring war, and you become king, we will be safer,” I mused. “This is all because of him. You’ll change the Otherworld for the better, and we won’t have to worry about assassinations and plots—at least not from anyone who can actually pull it off.”

“If I abdicated once he is overthrown, we would have to worry about it even less,” he said, making my eyes widen. “We would be left alone, in our little haven, without the pressures of the throne on our shoulders, without all this bullshit threatening us at every turn. I could sleep better at night knowing we didn’t have targets on our backs, that we were out of the firing line, and there was no motive for anyone to take you from me.”

That sounded nice, really nice, and exactly like what I’d thought about for months. I even recalled bringing it up at the beginning of our journey here, and how he had initially dismissed the idea. “Who would take the throne?”

“Orian,” he said without even a hint of hesitation, as if his previous qualms about his siblings being unprepared no longer mattered—and he no longer held the belief that they had a hand in the king’s plot.

I cocked a brow. “You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”