He was right. It was both maddening and ridiculous. Yet as I placed my hand over the gown, knowing I could snatch it and warp back to a secluded part of the woods near the towers to put it on, I hesitated.

I hesitated long enough to freeze entirely, my eyes closing as what awaited me infiltrated.

Bloom, we must talk.

I’d known.

I’d known for days that something had been wrong. Rorn had returned from overseeing a large soldier rotation more haunted than when he’d left. I’d been informed it had been a successful journey with little to no skirmishes, save for an encounter with a pack of wild hounds.

But the weeklong venture in swapping out troops to guard against another wave of mortal soldiers farther breaching the border had nonetheless eventuated into something heartbreaking.

Certain I wouldn’t survive knowing exactly what had happened, I’d walked away. I’d avoided him every day since he’d tensed at the sight of me waiting to greet him from across the river when he’d returned. Those frostbitten blue eyes hadn’t smiled, hadn’t looked upon me with any of the typical relief I’d come to expect with his arrival home.

They’d been empty of everything I’d needed and adored, and replaced with nothing I wanted to know.

Avoidance was futile. I was eventually cornered, the guilt too much for him to carry, it seemed. He’d needed to purge it.

He’d needed to destroy me to unburden himself.

And so I’d stood there, taking each word for the blows to the chest they’d been. He hadn’t realized how quickly I was bleeding out, nor the way I struggled to find my next breath. No—too busy vomiting apologies and promises and unforgivable truths, Rorn had barely noticed me at all.

It wasn’t until he’d placed his guilt upon me, until he’d used the one thing I’d thought we’d both wanted against me in his quest to cleanse his soul, that I’d finally moved.

“The constant talk of babes and the eternal disappointment we insist on enduring… I need an heir, Bloom. Wistensia needs one. We must move forward by any means possible.”

Those words became knives I’d been unable to pull free from my heart.

But I hadn’t walked away. Before Rorn’s slow to widen eyes, I’d merely vanished.

I’d returned at nightfall to find him seated on the end of our bed in our chambers, his eyes pillowed with shadows.

“Bloom,” he’d said, rising instantly.

And that had been when I’d told him we were no longer.

That had been when he’d stripped the worry from his features to replace it with cold ire—to remind me of all I’d once so desperately wished for. To ensure I was aware of what I could now never escape.