spent the last hour trying to think about what to say, and for the life of me, I can’t put this feeling into words. It’s not love—it couldn’t be, not in such a short amount of time. But if it’s not that, I don’t know what it is, or how to say it. I’m trying to understand, so that when I do talk to her, it goes better than this, because I can see I’m boring you, and never mind, I’ll just go back to my room and you can forget I ever came.”
The end of his ramblings only registered when Xander stood and began to shuffle toward the door.
“Wait,” Rafe said, jumping into motion. He grabbed Xander’s arm to detain him. “Wait. I—I remember.”
Xander turned slowly, eying him expectantly.
Rafe closed his lids as the memories washed over him, a dam set free, a rushing torrent he didn’t know how to control once it started. Oh, he thought of his mother often. The arms that used to wrap him up tightly. The voice that used to sing him to sleep. The laugh that was so infectious he would always laugh along with her, even in the middle of a tantrum. He thought of the two of them, alone in their room at the very bottom level of the castle, separate from the rest of the world, but it hadn’t mattered, because they had everything they needed. The stories they’d create. The games they’d play. The love that had filled that room, so incredibly powerful it had stayed with him long after she’d passed—but that wasn’t the love Xander was talking about.
No, the love she’d shared with his father had been different.
Rafe tried not to think about them—well, he tried not to think about his father—because whenever he did, he felt guilty. Guilty for those words that had been the king's last. I won’t leave you. I won’t leave our son. He’d died for loving Rafe more than Xander, for loving his mother more than the queen. And though he’d been little more than an innocent child, Rafe was exactly what the queen still called him—the bastard who had stolen so much from her son, who had stolen the meaning of love away and was now stealing something much greater.
“Love,” Rafe murmured, remembering the way his parents would look at each other in that small room, how they would tease and sometimes fight, how they would dance like fools with him between them and then slow down as though he weren’t there, how his mother would let her hair down and his father would remove his crown, and they’d be exactly who they were, for a little while at least. That feeling of freedom, of not having to hide, of being woven so closely nothing could ever undo them, that was love. And for a moment, Rafe pictured green eyes in the dark and two hands folded over one another, gold and silver sparking between them. But he blinked the picture away and turned to his brother, a hollow feeling growing cavernous in his gut. “Love is when you find a piece of yourself in someone else, a piece you never knew was missing, but without which you'd be broken. You feel whole, and complete, and accepted for exactly who you are. You can be your true self, because around this person, for the first time you have no desire to pretend to be anyone else.”
Xander stared for a moment too long, brows quivering in the slightest frown, before he carefully cleared his features. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience. Your own experience, I mean.”
Rafe tensed.
His gaze flicked to the curtains, then slid along the carpet until it reached his brother’s shoes. Drifting higher, he finally settled on the violet streaks of uncertainty in his brother’s eyes. The air was thick and full and heavy, pressing on him from all angles, prickling his skin.
Two people were listening.
Two people who deserved the truth.
But it seemed that, lately, all Rafe knew how to do was lie.
He laughed, a hearty, throaty sound that traveled up his chest and spewed out into the world dripping with deceit. Then he slapped Xander’s shoulder, giving him a light shove, as though he’d said the funniest, most ridiculous thing in the world. “In Taetanos’s name, Xander, sleep deprivation is getting to your head. If you’re going to talk nonsense, just leave me to my isolation. The only mate I spend my days longing for is the sky