I’m just a pawn in some game you’re playing with the Sovereign.”
Tears crawled down her cheeks. “That isn’t true. I’ve done nothing but try to protect us. I promise, I’ll tell you everything right now. I swear it.”
“It’s too late. Flynn knows. The damage is done.”
“It’s not. It’s not done.” Hesitantly, she made her way closer to him. “Tobias, things aren’t as they seem. I’m—”
“Stop it.”
“I’m trying to—”
“I said stop.”
A sob escaped her lips. “Tobias, please let me speak—”
“For God’s sake, why? So you can lie to me again and again?” He pointed a trembling finger her way. “I am done being toyed with. I am done being used and bartered and played.”
“That’s not what’s happening,” she maintained. “You know how I feel for you. You know what we have—”
“What we have is a mistake. You are nothing more than a mistake.”
Leila’s face dropped. With his words came a shift—in Leila, whose tears had stopped falling, and in the air, which was cold enough to turn his lungs to ice. His rage retreated; there was only Leila, the one person he trusted. The woman he loved. And she was staring back at him with dead eyes.
“Leila, I didn’t mean that.”
“Oh no, you meant it,” she said.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he forced himself to speak. “I’m here for Cosima whether I like it or not. What I want and how I feel…it doesn’t matter.” Tears sat in his eyes, but he kept them at bay. “We have to end things. I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you. We have to end things, because I have no choice.”
Leila did nothing, her gaze sharp. “Is that all?”
“I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
“Is that all, Tobias?”
A pang ripped through him, exposing his shattered insides. “Leila, can you just… Can you say something? Can you speak to me?”
“Speak to you? Why? So I can lie again and again?”
“Leila, I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t mean it? Were you lying? No, you wouldn’t dare. Now if I’m to understand you correctly, we’re done, yes?”
No. That’s not what I want. He took in a shallow breath. “Yes.”
She clenched her jaw. “Well then, I suppose this is the part where I tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“Leila—”
“Go.” She nodded at the door. “You’re dismissed.”
“I just had to—”
“Leave.”
“Leila, I’m—”
“Get out!” she screamed.
More tears sprang free from her eyes, but a second later they were gone, contained. She was better at this—controlling her rage. And now all her rage belonged to him.
With a nod, Tobias left the room. His body fought against him, screaming for him to turn back, yet he forced himself down the corridor, heading toward his dismal fate. If you win, you win Cosima, and if you lose, you die. He held on to those words, clinging to the only shred of truth he knew, but memories of Leila flooded him, her fiery eyes, her soft touch.
What have I done?
“Artist?”
Tobias lay facedown on his bed, more corpse than man. He hadn’t slept all night, his mind exhausted, his chest hollow and raw.
I took it out on her. Didn’t even let her speak. He winced into his pillow, consumed by his self-inflicted torture. He had lost his art first, then his family, his freedom, and his friends. Now he had lost Leila, the woman he loved. And with everything turning to rubble within him, he had lost himself. He had nothing.
“Artist.”
A servant stood at his bedside, her eyes sharp. Leila’s eyes looked sharp last night. The girl cocked her head at the doorway.
“Bathhouse.”
It took all his energy to pull himself from his bed and follow her from the room.
The girls scrubbed him in silence, leaving him with his conflicted thoughts. It’s better this way. Leila was safer without him, and they were simply prolonging the inevitable. But you didn’t have to scream at her. Or perhaps that was a good thing; perhaps she needed to hate him, that way she could move on, could find someone new. A guard passed through a nearby corridor. Like him. Tobias’s hands curled into fists beneath the water, and he suddenly hated that guard for no reason at all. Calm yourself. You’re a mess. His thoughts circled back to their original claim.
It’s better this way. But that felt like a lie.
Clean on the outside, he put on his pants and sandals, then waited as the girls covered every exposed inch of his flesh in oils, an annoyance he’d been spared of