All those years ago, Rorn had sworn he was ready to rule. But looking at him now, unable to escape where we’d ended up, perhaps he hadn’t been. Perhaps he still wasn’t.

He needed an heir. We needed a successor. If something happened to us—if the towers and the protection of this kingdom fell into the wrong hands…

There was no longer enough of our ilk left to take it back.

Too many had died or fled for safer lands with their families. An island once swarming with thousands of fae folk had now been whittled down to hundreds.

One broken heart was nothing when faced with the loss of everything.

Regardless, just the sight of him raked claws down my chest. Disgust and something sickening, something between anger and resentment, hollowed my lungs. I peeled off the stone doorframe and traipsed back upstairs to my paints. Not to paint, but to sleep.

I hadn’t returned to our bed since arriving home, and seemingly doing his utmost to avoid me, Rorn hadn’t tried to make me.

Home.

Its comforts no longer comforted. No longer glistened with faulty, fleeting promises that, somehow, everything would be okay. Time had proven there was no way of making that so. There was no more hope to gorge ourselves on. We were in too many differing pieces to fix.

And in the end, none of that mattered. I was still a wife. More importantly, I was still a queen.

I was still stuck.

“You know, I wasn’t entirely sure I believed you when you told me.” Rorn’s tone held an edge that suggested he’d been watching me for some unnoticed moments. “Didn’t believe you could actually do such a thing to me at all, let alone out of spite.”

I didn’t startle, but I placed the brush into the pot of water and met my husband’s frosted eyes. “Well, now you know.”

“You betrayed me out of spite,” he said again, features twisting with incredulity. “But I betrayed you for you.”

Blinking slowly at him, I had to refrain from laughing. From asking if he’d always been this arrogantly delusional, or if perhaps I’d been too in love to see it until now.

Instead, I wiped my hands over my paint dotted skirts and said, “You know I would never have agreed to…” I could barely conjure the words without that pit of forming rage getting the better of me. I gave in, setting some of it loose. “I would never be okay with something that contains the power to destroy me more than my inability to give you an heir.”

Rorn’s jaw ticked. Behind his closed lips, his tongue dragged over his teeth.

He eyed my soiled skirts, of which I typically went to great lengths to keep clean. “Who was it?” he finally said with a calm I did not trust.

“No one you know.”

“Astrantia,” he warned.