“Yes, why?”
“You dare ask?”
“Yes, Noctorno, seeing as I don’t know you, I met you just yesterday, I dare ask,” I stated cautiously.
“So this is your game now?”
“No, this is honesty,” I told him honestly.
His hold on his temper slipped and his face got in mine where he clipped, “Sly cow.”
Um… ouch.
“That’s mean and it isn’t true,” I returned quietly.
He kept at me. “Black with trickery to your bloody soul.”
“That isn’t true either,” I whispered.
He glowered at me and I did my best to brave it out. When I was about to give up, he gave in.
“This is the game you wish to play?”
“It isn’t a game,” I reminded him of something he refused to believe.
“This is the game you wish to play,” he decided and I sighed.
I was right. He refused to believe or, likely, Cora of this world was just that much of a bitch.
“Right,” he went on, “then you play your game, I play mine.” That didn’t sound too good, I braced and he kept talking which luckily meant he explained. “You’re the other half to my soul.”
I blinked.
Then I whispered, “What?”
“You heard me.”
“I’m the other half to your soul?”
“In all the kingdom, in our generation, there are only two men whose souls were split at birth, the other half put in their lifemates. Dash to Rosa and you to me. The she-god saw fit to award Dash all the sweetness of Rosa and for some bloody hideous reason she saw fit to saddle me with all the foulness of you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, it wasn’t nice but it also sounded like something the Cora of this world deserved so I didn’t speak.
Noctorno did. “For any other man but Dash or me, they could take anyone as bride. For him, it was only Rosa, the reason why you couldn’t have him, not that he wanted you. To hold back the curse you started to unleash yesterday, and because we agreed to do it in order to give the others the happiness they deserve, you had to leave him to her and wed me. And for me, it was only you. I had no other choice.”
Oh my God.
That was crazy.
“That’s crazy!” I cried, pressing back into the wall.
“Bloody right it is,” he agreed firmly.
I stared at him.
As crazy as this was, it was worse. Because he struck me as a man who liked choice, a man who would value, beyond anything, his free will, a man who’d fight and die for it and yet it had been taken away.
“Couldn’t you, um… protest this decision?”