Page 122 of Ironling
“Never.” He dropped his head to press kisses to her damp face. Her tears stung his lips, but he didn’t care. “I am for you,vinya.Always. Tell me how to help you.”
She cupped his face in her hand, her touch so achingly soft. “You can’t.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“There’s nothing you can do. You’re…”Just a blacksmith.
Hakon stiffened.
Straightening in his lap, Aislinn looked up at him in regret. “There’s nothing to do but wait,” she amended. “I need time.”
“You would bargain with your hand. With yourlife.”
“Yes.”
His lip curled in disdain. “It’s too high a price.”
He knew she agreed from the way her mouth thinned, but she said nothing.
Hakon’s throat closed around all the demands he wanted to make. That she let him kill Bayard. That she come to him as she had before. That she be his and only his, politics be damned.
That she let him steal her into the night, never to look back.
They sat in their silent impasse, neither finding words.
His heart began to thump, the tie he felt to her, to the bond growing between them, tightening with tension. Distance had grown between them, the chasm wider with every moment, and he didn’t know how to reach her.
What they had was new, fragile, and for the first time, he truly feared that it might not survive the winter.
But then, in the silence, more tears spilled from her eyes. Hopelessness pulled at her face as she murmured, “What if my father dies?”
Her lips peeled back across her teeth in a show of despair, and Hakon wouldn’t allow it. He pulled her back into his arms, denying the distance.
This Hakon understood. Grief and how it chewed you up inside. Made all the worse by grieving for someone who wasn’t yet gone. Hakon had watched his grandfather’s passing inch closer, and no amount of pleading or denying had stalled it. For all his love and strength and wish for it not to be so, death had come. It always did, in its time.
He knew, though, that those weren’t comforting words to hear. It wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear in his grandfather’s last hours, and it wasn’t what he told his mate, either.
“He’s strong,” Hakon said instead, “it isn’t his fate.”
Tears garbled her words as she curled into him.
Hakon stood, cradling her close. She protested when he began to snuff the candles, insisting she needed to finish the letters.
“They’ll keep.”
The solar slowly plunged into darkness, Hakon keeping only the lantern lit as he carried it and her into her adjoining bedchamber.
The room was dominated by an ornately carved four-postbed. Heavy green curtains embroidered with pastoral scenes had been pulled back and tied to the posts, and a small mountain of pillows sat neatly at the head.
He set the lantern on the bedside table and her on the bed. Kneeling, he unlaced her boots and carefully pulled each foot free. She watched him with heavy-lidded eyes as his hands delved under her skirts to find and untie her stockings. The warm silk glided against his fingers as he pulled them down the curves of her legs.
“Morning will come, and you are strong enough to meet it.”
Her face fell, and he feared more tears. Instead, she reached down to take his face in her hands. Her forehead met his, and in the warm darkness, they shared breath.
His heart ached for her and for all that was unsaid and unknown.
“I would do anything for you,vinya,” he couldn’t help whispering. She had to know—had to see that all he was and would ever be was hers. Her birthright, the politics, none of it truly mattered. He wouldn’t give her up—he couldn’t.
