Of myself.
Embarrassed and ashamed, as well as confused, I drew my hands to my chest to shield his gaze. “Please don’t look at me that way. You said you loved me, but now, the way you look at me, I feel like a spectacle.”
Before I could get away from him to be alone with my shame, he seized my wrists firmly but not roughly. He prized my hands from my breasts and lifted my left breast, looking beneath it. “Sara, this mark…”
“What can be so awful about a birthmark?” I sobbed, trying desperately to cover myself with the blankets. “Please stop that, Bors. Please stop looking at me that way.”
Letting go of my wrists, he searched my face—for what, I did not know. “You’ve never seen it, have you?” He asked, withdrawing from me even further. “You don’t know what you are, do you?”
I couldn’t bear such shame. “I have seen it, when I was a child, before my body grew. It is a purple splotch. Is a mark so horrible? You speak of me like I’m a beast. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please,” I sniffled as the tears trickled down my cheeks. “Please just leave me alone.”
He didn’t. Instead he rose, naked before me. He placed his hand to his jaw and dragged his fingers down his stubble with a sandpapery hiss as he stared at me.
I closed my eyes tightly and rolled away from him, curling into a fetal position and sobbing into the pillow. My shame and heartbreak merged into the purest sort of pain. I felt like a blind leper, unable to know my own body’s horrors and deformities, repulsive to the man I had been fool enough to love.
Stupid girl.
Bors
In one second, she went from being my future wife to my future queen.
Beneath her left breast she bore the unmistakable mark of the stolen royal—a crescent moon with a star in its hollow. I had seen the image many times over the past eighteen years, on banners that hung from the castle battlements a hundred miles to the east, and on the royal crier’s ornamental shield that he carried into the many towns closer to the royal castle on every anniversary of her disappearance.
Hear ye, hear ye, one and all. Should any subject of this kingdom see this mark upon the body of a young woman, present the woman before King Rowan, for she is the lost daughter of the realm and the heir to the throne. Hear ye, hear ye…
I was fucking stunned. I could hardly believe it, and yet it wasn’t hard to believe at all. She’d been my princess from the beginning. This was just confirmation of what I’d known in my gut all along.
“Bors, please! Please stop looking at me that way,” she said when she turned from where she’d fallen into a ball on the daybed, now nearly hysterical with confusion. “Why do you look at me so? Why do I feel like I am untouchable?”
Untouchable is exactly what she was.
Royal, chosen, fucking blessed by God himself.
In her presence, I was less than nothing. All the instincts that had told me I wasn’t good enough for her were true.
More true than I could have imagined.
All of my dreams for the two of us, all my plans for the future, blew up when I laid eyes on that mark. She might as well have stabbed me through the heart. I had dirtied the missing royal child with my blind lust for her and ruined her future. I had no claim on her at all. It didn’t matter if I had a thousand goddamned decrees from the clan council, it wouldn’t change the truth.
Their authority would never take precedent over the authority of the king. I was Sara’s subject, not the other way around. My permission to marry her was worthless; such things made no difference to the king and the queen. Decrees were common documents for common men. I knew as I stood there, taking it all in, that I was going to lose her forever.
She held the bedclothes to her chest, still trying to shield herself from my gaze, while also reaching out for me to try to get me to come back to her. Clearly, her confusion was no act. Someone must have known her true identity, but Sara sure as hell hadn’t.
But as her subject, it was my duty to tell her the truth. It didn’t matter if my punishment was a broken heart or death. As if there was any fucking difference.
I dropped to one knee beside her, genuflecting in submission. Though I knew I was unworthy of even touching her skin, I also knew it was my duty to comfort her as best I could. The whole fucking thing made me feel like I’d been whiplashed. But it didn’t matter how I felt. Not at all. She was what mattered—now, always. And so, I swept her tears aside to try to calm her. “Please don’t cry, your highness.”