Ivetta and I finished eating and left my rowdy brothers behind in the round table room. She was still smiling when we left, but it wasn’t long before that smile began to fade. I could guess what she was thinking about.
“I didn’t tell you about Clavis because I didn’t quite know what to make of his visit,” she finally said.
“What did he want?” I asked quietly.
She sighed. “He wanted to know why we weren’t sleeping together.”
I should have killed him. It was bad enough Leon and Nokto pestered me occasionally about that. She didn’t need that kind of pressure.
“You’ve already dealt with him, Chevalier,” she reminded me, sensing my tension. “Besides, it actually worked out pretty well for you. He was telling me about how much you liked me right away, and that’s why I asked you about that.”
She was quite good at distracting me from my anger. Her words drew my attention back to those few minutes in my library when she - and I - nearly lost control, and then she rested her cheek against my arm, the physical contact cementing my focus on her.
Clavis was lucky.
“Chevalier, are we going to have separate rooms even after we’re married?” she asked quietly.
“No,” I said, without any hesitation.
“Good.”
If only it would be this easy to talk to Sariel about that. He wouldn’t be too hard to convince, actually; it was the idiotic court ministers that would present a problem. They had been given far too much leeway when my father was king.
“Where are we going?” Ivetta asked, looking up at me curiously.
I glanced down at her and smirked. “It’s your turn.”
She blushed and looked away. “Maybe that’s not the best idea. After what happened before…”
I opened the door to the gardens, cold winter air striking my face. “Which is why we’re going outside,” I said, slipping my arm around her waist and pulling her to my side so my cloak wrapped around us both.
She giggled as I led her onto the frosty cobblestone path. “And we’re supposed to stay cool this way?”
“If you get too hot, I’ll push you into a snowbank,” I teased. “So?”
“Hm.” She was silent for a moment, thinking back. “Well, I thought you were rude, arrogant, and frightening at first. And your teasing was very confusing. I couldn’t figure out what you were thinking.”
I leaned in and kissed her neck.
“Chevalier!” she protested, blushing.
“I hope I’m not confusing you,” I teased, kissing her again.
She giggled and pulled away from me, hugging herself in the cold. “Do you want to hear this or not?” she asked, smiling and shivering.
I stepped toward her, pulling her back into the warmth of my embrace. “Yes, I do,” I murmured, kissing her again.
“You’re not making this easy,” she chided.
“Would you prefer I stop?” I replied with another light kiss.
“Well, I don’t mind either way. If you’d rather I tell you later…”
I sighed and pulled back to kiss the top of her head. “Fine. Go on.”
She took a deep breath and started again. “But I started to enjoy our back and forth. And as strange as your behavior could be, it was becoming increasingly obvious that you were concerned about me. I started to feel comfortable with you, and safe.” She wrapped her arms around my waist and gave me a soft squeeze. “The festival was a lot of fun. So was reading in the gardens.”
“You can skip the next part,” I said quietly.
“No, I can’t,” she replied, suddenly serious. She looked up at me, her green eyes earnest. “You saved me, Chevalier. Mother was the only person I could ever talk to, and I never wanted her to hear about that, so I just decided I’d take care of it all myself. But you saved me, and you wouldn’t let me believe the things he said. You don’t know what that meant to me, to finally be able to trust somebody.”
“And then I broke that trust,” I added bitterly.
She shook her head. “Only for a little while.”
“You don’t have to spare my feelings, Ivetta. I saw your nightmare the night you were in my bed. I know I was part of it.”
She stared up at me, her green eyes wide with shock. I knew she remembered at least parts of that night. I couldn’t forget any of it.
“What do you mean, you saw it?”
“You were acting it out. I didn’t save you, Ivetta. You barely got away,” I said insistently.
“But I did get away, and you stopped it from happening again,” she replied.
That much was true. So was the part about me being part of her nightmare, and I wasn’t going to let her tell me otherwise.
“I tried to wake you, and for a moment, I thought I had. You looked right at me and said my name. Then you grabbed my shirt and pulled yourself into my arms, and you started begging me not to make you say it.”
“No,” she said softly, shaking her head. “That’s not-”
“That is what happened, Ivetta.”
“Just - just wait. I’m trying to remember.” She squeezed her eyes shut and rested her forehead on my chest.
This was not going as I’d expected, and I didn’t want her thinking about it. She would just remember the nightmare, remember my part in it, and prove me right. As if I didn’t hate myself enough for what I did to her the morning after the assassination attempt.
I shouldn’t have stopped kissing her. I didn’t want to hear this.
“The nightmare started off the same way it always did,” she said slowly, “but then…I kept hearing your voice, calling my name, and…the dream changed. I was looking for you, but I couldn’t find you. Then I…I guess I woke up, but I thought it was still part of the dream, and…”
She stopped, and I knew why. I clenched my jaw, furious with myself all over again, but she opened her eyes and looked up at me with no anger or hurt in her steady gaze.
“I wanted to be safe with you,” she said softly. “But I was afraid you would try to scare me away again. I wasn’t afraid of you at all.”
I stared down at her in silence, replaying her whispered words in my head.
“I can’t say it. Please don’t ask me to say it. That’s not who you are.”
Even asleep, she was forgiving.
She reached up and brushed the hair back from my face. “That morning never made it into my nightmares.”
I sighed and rested my forehead on hers, my gut twisting.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“You’re right. I’m supposed to be telling you when I first realized I had feelings for you,” she said, smiling up at me. “The goodwill gala, I guess, but I kept telling myself I was just too tired and overwhelmed to think straight. When I finally admitted it to myself…” Her smile faded again. “Never mind. You don’t want to hear about that.”
“No, I don’t,” I said firmly, tightening my arms around her. I never wanted to think of her in that dungeon again.
“Can we go back to the library? And read Mother’s letter?”
Anything to stop talking about this. I turned back to the palace without a word, tugging her after me, but she suddenly planted her feet.
“Is this what you do?” she asked when I looked at her questioningly. “Ignore the bad memories and hope they go away?”
Or beat somebody bloody. I gritted my teeth, my chest feeling tight and heavy. “Ivetta-”
She pulled at my hand and started walking toward the back of the gardens. For possibly the first time since I met her, I didn’t want to follow her, but I did anyway.
“It doesn’t work, Chevalier. I should know,” she continued, leading me to the gazebo. She released my hand and sat down on the bench, patting the spot beside her.
I seriously considered turning and walking away, but the image of her alone in the cold stopped me. I sat down next to her and wrapped my cloak around her shoulders.
“You’re always correcting my misconceptions about myself, and it’s my turn to do it for you,” she said firmly. “Nothing that happened to me was your fault. I have felt safe with you ever since the assault. And I was a fool not to realize that I loved you until I was locked in that dungeon, and I thought I’d never see you again.”
I wanted to hit Clavis just for getting her thinking about this.
She realized when she was being beaten to death in a dungeon? And I realized after decapitating a would-be assassin.
What a bloody start to this romance.
Her green eyes were intent on mine, and there was no getting around it. I was going to have to say something, or just get up and walk away. She would still bring this up again later, as many times as she had to until I finally told her.
“That was my nightmare,” I finally said.
She reached over and took my hand, giving it a gentle squeeze, but she didn’t say anything. I sighed and slid closer to her, resting my head on hers. “When you weren’t at the funeral, it felt like my world fell apart. A torn strip of your dress - a bloody footprint in the dirt - that was all I had left of you.”
This wasn’t helping. If anything, my chest only felt tighter. I took a deep, shuddering breath, the horrible memories flooding my thoughts.
“Nothing mattered anymore, just finding you. And when I discovered it was Flandre - when I knew he was going to torture you-”
The sudden lump in my throat made me stop. I hadn’t cried since I found her. I didn’t want to cry now.
“It’s okay to cry, Chevalier,” she whispered, sliding her hand around to the back of my neck and pulling my head down to her chest. “You’re always here for me when I need you, and I want to be here for you, too. I won’t think any less of you for just being human. I love you, and I don’t want to see you in pain.”
Why did she have to be this way?
I wasn’t there for her, I didn’t deserve her compassion, and I didn’t want to cry in front of her about my failures. But her heart was beating steadily in my ear, and her fingers were combing through my hair, and I remembered those agonizing hours when I didn’t know where she was or if she was even alive, the shock of seeing her hanging limp and bloody in the dark - and my tears were soaking the front of her dress whether I wanted them to or not. The warm moisture on my head told me she was crying, too, but she didn’t say anything more. She just held me.
I hated this.
But there was also a strange sense of relief from finally talking about it. To her. Nobody else ever needed to hear this.
It was a long time before I spoke again.
“I thought I was too late. I thought I’d made it just in time to watch you die, too far gone to be saved.”
“Chevalier…” She hesitated, and she kissed the top of my head. “I thought I was supposed to die, so you would forget about me and move on.”
I pulled back to stare at her, shocked. Her heart-shaped face, her emotional green eyes, her red, tear-stained cheeks, her full, pink lips - she was all I wanted, all I could think about for so long even before the abduction.
“I could never forget you, little dove.”
I kissed her with a sudden intensity that made her gasp in surprise. The saltiness of our mingled tears, the sweetness of her lips, the warmth of her cheeks under my hands - I needed her. Desperately. I couldn’t think anymore. She was everything, clutching at my shirt as I slid my hands around to tangle in her hair, cradling the back of her head as I shifted to straddle her, my knees pressing into the cold stone on either side of her thighs. I couldn’t stop kissing her, drawing soft moans from her throat, until I physically had to take a breath.
“Ch-chevalier,” she gasped, staring at me wide-eyed.
“Don’t make me stop, Ivetta,” and then I was kissing her neck, my hands sliding down her back and around her waist to her stomach, feeling the heat radiating through her dress, needing more of her. All of her.
It was a shock to my system when she pushed me away and stood up. I clutched at the stone bench, my knuckles turning white, gasping for breath as she walked to the front of the gazebo and grabbed at a metal pillar, leaning heavily against it.
One month until the wedding. Why was it so wrong to give in now? What was stopping her?
I dragged my hands over my face, exhaling deeply, and stood up.
“Ivetta,” I said softly, approaching her carefully.
“Please don’t touch me,” she said, her voice strangled. She rested her cheek against the pillar, her hand trembling where it clutched tightly to the cold metal. “It doesn’t make sense. I know that. But we’ve made it this far, and…”
“You don’t have to explain,” I said, my frustrated sigh echoing the voice of the churning heat in my stomach.
She pushed herself away from the pillar and stepped out onto the cobblestone path, the wind picking up and whipping her long, silky black hair around her.
“You deserve an explanation,” she finally said, turning back to face me. Her face was as deeply flushed as it had been earlier in the library. “And I have one, a good one, but I just can’t think of it right now.”
I didn’t need an explanation. She deserved to have her wishes respected, and if this was what she wanted, then I was just going to deal with it. I left the gazebo and took her hand.
“We should go back.”
We walked side by side through the gardens in silence, not looking at each other. The cold winter air had me back down to a normal temperature by the time we arrived at the palace, and she, too, had lost her flush when she walked past me as I held the door open for her.
“Ivetta,” I said quietly, continuing with her to her room.
“Yes?”
“It would be better if you read the letter by yourself.”
She nodded. “That’s probably a good idea.”
Her guards were waiting at her door, and I stopped us there and gave her a light kiss.
“Goodnight, Ivetta.”
“Goodnight, Chevalier.”
I was physically and emotionally exhausted, but I walked back to the library for her study supplies. They were on the coffee table where we’d left them. I picked them up and took them back to her room, handing them off to the guards before I left again.
One more month. One more long, miserable month. I was going to have to schedule more trips and stop seeing her alone. Fifteen minutes was too long. Five minutes was too long.
She thought she should die so I could move on?
I was too tired to think about it anymore. I didn't even need a cold bath. Just to drop into bed and pass out.
“Chevalier.”
No. I didn't care who it was, or what they wanted. I wasn't talking to anybody right now.
"Chevalier, wait up!"
"Tomorrow," I snapped, entering my room and slamming the door shut behind me.
I even locked it for good measure.27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxXiYaDV4Be
