“Ailsa, I—”
“Don’t,” she broke him off. She didn’t want his pity, to hear him apologize for telling her the truth. Had her sisters known the price of their powers? Did they think it a mercy to lie to her? To mask a curse as an illness.
“And Erik didn’t leave me by choice,” she whispered to herself. Knowing Eurik, he would have traded his own son for that amount of gold. Erik would have never had a choice. While the idea was satisfying, it didn’t make her feel any differently about him. He had been her entire life until she finally experienced what else the world had to offer. Suddenly his influence on her heart was much less significant, much smaller next to giants.
Vali’s brows jumped despite his unenthusiastic frown. “He had a choice, Ailsa, and instead he was selfish. You should not chase after a man who puts a monetary value on your heart.”
“I chase no man,” she said slowly, closely studying his reaction. His eyes betrayed no hint of emotion, but his knee bounced to the rhythm of her unsteady heart. She was starting to learn how his body translated his thoughts. How he smoothed his palms across his thighs when he was anxious, bit his cheek when he was holding back a truth, bounced one knee when he was excited, two when he was worried. And how his shoulders fell when he was crestfallen, how drooped they had been when he left four days ago.
She asked him, “What would you have done? If you were starting a new kingdom in a new land and someone offered you an empire worth of gold to stay away from me? You cannot believe he didn’t take the better half of the bargain.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “If you were mine, I’d be selfish too. But in an entirely different manner. I’d shove your father’s gold so far up his ass, he’d be coughing up coins.”
The mental image made her laugh despite her anger, but something about the sober look in his eyes told her he wasn’t jesting. She sighed, her gaze falling far away as she thought of her father and Erik, of all the men in her life that had her as an option, yet never chose her. “Why is everyone else allowed to be selfish but me?” she asked no one in particular.
“Is there something you want, Ailsa?” She looked at him again, and he wore a conniving grin, the one he put on right before doing something despicable.
Her gaze fell to his chest, watching the rise and fall increase with speed, matching the rate of her own. “Yes.”
The affirmation pulled her toward him, and she was no longer in control of her strides as she crossed the small cell to where he sat, stepping between his legs. His grin fell and he sat straighter as she looked down on him. Her hands found themselves on his shoulders tight with strain beneath her touch. Perhaps she could think of herself, for once. Damn the rest of the worlds who thought she should choose differently.
“I need to be honest with you, Vali,” she said quietly, fumbling with the jagged neckline of his shirt where the stitching didn’t take.
He stared up at her, the sunshine gone from his gaze, veiled by an overcast to leave them dark and dangerous. “What is it?”
“I didn’t make you a shirt because you tore up your old one for me. Skiord already gave you a perfectly fine shirt to replace it.” She took a steadying breath before continuing. “Where I am from, a woman will make a garment for a man if she is… interested in him.”
“Interested?” The word came off his tongue painfully slow. “Can you clarify what that means exactly?”
She squinted her eyes at him in scrutiny. “Do I need to spell it out for you, Vali?”
“I want to be sure you’re saying what I…hopeyou are very shrewdly implying.” His hands lifted from his thighs to the crest of her hip bones, and she was powerless as they pulled the words from her lips.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about the past few weeks. I have decided that I cannot fault you for killing my family. Once I understood your world better, listened to your story, and the politics backing your heinous motivation, my heart softened toward you in a way I cannot quite explain.”
“Are you saying,” he said each word methodically, “that you don’t hate me anymore?”
Her fingers nestled into the nape of his neck where they caught lingering drops of rain. “I only hate that I feel drawn to you when I know I shouldn’t. I hate that I think about you when you are gone. But most of all I hate that you were fated to be my enemy, and yet my heart was destined to want you.”
He shut his eyes briefly, weighing the enormity of her honesty, the implications of her words and their effect on his feelings. They flickered open. “And now? Do you still want to stab me?” His voice was dry in his throat, and he craned his head to lean into her hands.
“Aye, sometimes I do.” She smiled. “But I want to do other things, as well.”
“Well, I’m sure we can work something out.”
She pulled a stray hair out of his face, adoring the way he looked at her. The way he hung onto every word and waited patiently for her next move. How his hands bruised the skin over her bones in a way that felt admiring, beseeching, wanting. “Are you sure you don’t want to give this fine shirt to your lionheart?”
She smoothed her hands down his shoulders and slanted her head, pretending to think over his offer. “No,” she finally said. “Erik has a much larger physique than you. Much more muscular. This would never fit him.”
“Oh,right. He’s just layers of more man than me.”
“Precisely. I’d have to make another shirt and I’m afraid I’m all out of fabric. Guess I’m stuck with you.”
His upper lip snarled, flashing a row of white teeth she recalled like to bite. “How…” he croaked. “How does a man in your world respond to such a gift?”
“If he does not feel the same, he gives the shirt back or burns it. If he accepts her advances, typically he will give her purple flowers in return.”
Vali flicked his tongue over his teeth in thought before his eyes lit up with the intensity of a hundred suns. The storm in his eyes suddenly cleared. He held up a single finger. “One moment. Don’t move.”