But he could never be my cornerstone. No matter how hard I wished it so. I could never twist and shape him into being what I needed. It wouldn’t be fair to him. Or to me. Especially if I ended up hurting him because I lost control.
And Ryan… well. That was always going to be a mistake. Because he was promised to another and regardless how I felt about the Prince of Douchedom, I would never do something like that to Justin. And not as if Ryan would anyway. He had a fucking prince. I was nothing more than an apprentice.
Justin looked like a god.
I looked like a peasant.
Justin was royalty.
I was from the slums.
Justin was—
“Oh my gods
,” I groaned. “I am so pathetic.”
Fuck that, because that wasn’t who I was.
I was awesome.
I was epic.
I was a badass fucking wizard’s apprentice who would one day change the way people looked at magic.
I was going to rescue people from the slums and make their lives better.
I was going to open a shop where anyone got to come in and hug puppies for free and leave with a balloon, ice cream, and a compliment. “Here’s your pistachio cream. I made you a balloon animal in the shape of a walrus. You have very nice knuckles.”
I was going to finish my Grimoire, and five hundred years from now, people would be studying it and thinking to themselves, Wow. That Sam was pretty neat. I wish I could have been his best friend forever.
Because I was Sam of Wilds.
Maybe I didn’t look like I was a god.
(More like the gods had a sense of humor.)
But I could do things that were almost godlike.
I could create. I could rejuvenate. I could make something out of nothing because I was godlike—
Yikes.
“Curb the ego, Sam,” I muttered to myself.
But I was something, okay? I was. I’d come from a place where not much hope resided, and whether by accident or design, I’d changed the shape of my future and not just for me. For my mother. For my father. They had given me everything they had, and I was able to give them something back.
That should have counted for something.
And it did.
But still….
There was an ache in my heart.
To know my cornerstone was here and I could never have him.
It wasn’t the be-all and end-all.