“I . . . I just don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” I murmured, a statement that now and had perhaps always included him, too.

“After much thought,” he said, “it is my wish to cancel our agreement.”

A silent bomb went off somewhere in my midsection.

“You want . . .” I whispered, shaking my head. “You want to break the deal?”

“I wish to propose a new one,” he said, glancing at me from over one shoulder, but only briefly. “Timid” was the only way to describe him in that moment. Not a word I ever imagined using in reference to him.

I grew cold all over, the blood rushing out of my veins.

“You want me to marry you,” I muttered, my stomach clenching.

“I want you to agree to,” he corrected. “If you agreed . . . I think I could release you in exchange.”

My insides withered with the weight of the fear his suggestion sent coursing through me. “But that makes no sense.”

“It buys you your freedom,” he whispered. “Your release.”

I stood there, dumbfounded. Trying to process the logic behind his plan.

He turned to face me—suddenly grim and awesome once more. “You would only be required to agree to my proposal. We would be engaged but nothing else. You could think of it as . . . as a game.”

I scowled, my horror growing. Because it sounded like a trick.

“You’re forgetting that you almost did kill him,” I whispered, hating having to bring up Lucas. Because any attention on Lucas was too much. “And that was after you’d promised you wouldn’t. What would keep you from hurting him if I accepted this new agreement?”

“So long as you have promised me your hand, swearing off all rivals . . . I will be unable to treat him as such. To behave in any other way would deny my trust in you.”

“But . . . once I go home. What happens then? I still won’t be free. And I can’t marry you. I’m sorry, Erik, but—”

He turned toward me, his gaze meeting mine full-on.

“Stephanie,” he whispered, like I’d missed his whole point. Like it had been the simplest of math equations I’d failed to solve for and not the bombshell he proceeded to drop in my lap with his next utterance. “That is why you must betray me.”

SEVENTY

Zedok

Her eyes. Within them, I saw the spark of hope ignite.

In the next instant, though, she set her jaw as though she feared I had noticed.

Had she forgotten I could feel her now as she could feel me? Her fear over the prospect of being joined together with one such as I. Had it not decimated me? Nearly as much as her hope now buoyed me.

“This heart you have given me will rupture,” I told her, touching my chest. “There can be no avoiding it. And so, once our deal is done, you must leave Moldavia.”