He forced down the bile churning in his gut and deliberately steadied his voice.
“I will act as if I never heard that.”
He spat the words out in a rigid tone and turned to change, but a rustling rose behind him.
Looking back, he saw her pushing herself upright, her hair in disarray.
As she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, the blanket slipped from shoulders that seemed fragile enough to shatter. The nightgown, altered to accommodate her pregnancy, hung loose, making her look smaller and younger still.
She swayed as she came toward him, as delicate as spun glass, fixing him with a pale, chilling gaze.
“Why?”
Varkas reached to catch her, then curled his hand into a fist in midair. It felt as though laying a hand on her too hastily might break her entirely.
“Why must I stay here?”
She threw the question at him, testing the limits of his patience.
“I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be with you. Looking at your face makes me feel as if I’m losing my mind.”
Her voice wavered, thin and drawn taut like a viola string strained to snapping. Her frail fingers knotted into his clothes, clinging as if to life itself.
“Send me somewhere—anywhere! The Imperial Palace, a monastery, I don’t care!”
His patience snapped. He shoved her back onto the bed. Her ragged breath, venting through cracked lips, washed hot over his throat. Her blue eyes, wide and dilated, swam right before him. He drove each word hard into those drowning depths.
“Rave all you like. Nothing will change.”
Her face contorted in disbelief, and that baffled look carved into his chest all the deeper.
Goaded by a dark impulse he had not known he possessed, he murmured low:
“You will spend your entire life within my lands. That fate was sealed the moment you swore with your own lips to become my wife.”
He felt the chill across her skin turn to goosebumps beneath his hands. A fragile, shattered light—part confusion, part resentment, part terror—filled her gaze.
He stared down into it for a breath before tearing himself away to sit on the edge of the bed. As he struggled to gather his frayed thoughts, she drove a blade into what remained of him.
“How… how can you be so untouched?”
His spine locked. Varkas turned toward her, slow and stiff.
Talia, who had been glaring with sheer malice, broke into violent sobs.
“Our baby died… How can you be so cold? I… it hurts so much…”
She began to tear at her chest as though enduring physical torture.
He stared at her blankly and asked himself:
Am I untouched?
Perhaps he was.
He could not share the agony tearing through her.
Even when their firstborn had failed to draw a single breath, he had seen only his bleeding wife.
He had even refused her pleas to hold the child. He could not allow it, terrified that if she saw the lifeless body, she would let go of life itself.
He had truly believed that so long as she survived, the child did not matter. Even now, his only wish was that she would forget the dead infant and escape this grief as swiftly as she could.
Whether she came to despise him more than she already did, he was on the verge of confessing as much when a tiny face, bundled in swaddling clothes, seared into his mind like an open burn.
A face no larger than his palm. Features that might have favored him half, and her half…
The memory of that tiny scrap of life buried in the dirt without ever being cradled in its mother’s arms seized his tongue, locking it fast.
Hollowed by helplessness, his arms fell limp at his sides.
She was no longer looking at him. He watched in silence as she wept into her trembling hands, then stood.
If he stayed any longer, he feared he might surrender to whatever she asked.
Fleeing the bedchamber, Varkas turned the lock and leaned his leaden weight against the wood.
Through blurred vision, he watched the window drink in the sunset. Sensing his thoughts slowly staining red, he pressed hard against eyelids as dry as grit.
It was the end of a long, punishing day.
After that day, Talia grew far more vicious.
She wanted Varkas to tire of her. She wanted him to cast her aside without a shred of remorse.
Everyone else had already abandoned her entirely.
The Emperor’s willingness to grant a divorce meant Senevier had discarded her as well. Losing the child had stripped away whatever usefulness she had left.
Realizing that had brought a sting of pain, but the shock had not cut nearly as deep as she expected.
She no longer cared about her mother.
Talia stopped searching for a way to survive. She would not care if Gareth butchered her where she stood. All she wanted was to be away from this man.
She watched Varkas through eyes hollowed by agony. He was changing out of the clothes she had soiled with the bowl of porridge she hurled.
The composure with which he moved, as if nothing had occurred, suffocated her. His patience was monstrous. And the monster she became in his presence was more terrifying still.
She muttered in a hollow voice,
“Aren’t you sick of this yet?”
Varkas pulled a dark blue tunic over his shoulders and looked back at her.
His face offered nothing, save for a faint cast of exhaustion. After watching her through eyes veiled like frosted glass, he rolled his cuffs and spoke in his usual measured cadence.
“Shouldn’t you be the one growing tired of these childish tantrums?”
Talia gave a lifeless laugh.
A wave of futility washed over her, knowing that the fits she despised in herself amounted to nothing more than tantrums in his eyes.
“Most of the vassals want me gone anyway. Everyone would be happier if I vanished.”
“Since when did other people’s happiness concern you?”
Letting out a dry breath, Varkas brought the fresh tray the maids had prepared over to the bed.
Talia looked down at it, blank and emptied. After three outbursts that day, she lacked the strength even to knock the bowl away.
“Must I feed you myself?”
Yielding to the quiet press of his voice, she took up the spoon.
As she forced down a few mouthfuls, she caught a fleeting glimpse of relief across his face. She turned her eyes away, only to hear a presence at the door.
“Your Grace, guests have arrived from the capital. You must come down.”
It was the head butler.
Talia looked toward him, spoon still held in her hand. Varkas frowned toward the window, then reached for his coat.
“I will be down shortly.”
He rang the bell to summon the maids, ordered them not to take their eyes off her for an instant, and left the room.
END