Chapter 205: TEN MINUTES

AMARIS

Ten minutes is not enough time to prepare for the end of the world, but it is enough time to get dressed for it, and I have always believed in being dressed for the occasion.

I put on the navy dress. The Luna dress. The one that announces respectability, which under the circumstances was either armor or satire, and this morning I was prepared to let it be both.

We walked down together, the three of us, and nobody spoke on the stairs. Ryker walked on my left with his jaw set forward. Rowan walked on my right with his jaw set inward. I walked in the middle doing the thing I do, which is narrating my own funeral to keep my hands from shaking.

At least the tray survived. Small mercies. That woman raised those cups from porcelain infancy.

The study door stood open.

Corvin was not behind the desk. He was standing at the window with his back to the room, hands clasped behind him, and the morning light put an edge on him, and the whole study smelled like banked temper, like a fire that has been fed and then ordered to wait.

We came in. Rowan closed the door.

The latch clicked, and Corvin turned around.

I have seen this man cold. I have seen him at his cruelest, across a dining table, pricing me. I have seen him furious at a gate report and gutted in a firelit chair. I had never seen this. His face was completely composed and his eyes were not, and the distance between those two things was the widest I had ever measured on a human being.

“Whose idea,” he began, quiet, “was the lying.”

“Nobody lied to you,” Ryker answered.

“Careful.” One word, and it came out with weight on it. “You have one conversation’s worth of my patience, and you have decided to spend it on technicalities. Nobody lied. Nobody spoke. You let me walk this house for weeks like a man learning to be happy, and every one of you knew what I was walking past. There are honest silences, and there are silences with architecture, and you built yours with my own trust for scaffolding.”

“That is not what this was,” I whispered.

“Then tell me what it was.” His eyes came to me, and they were terrible, not because they were hard but because underneath the hard they were hurt, openly, unguarded, the one thing Corvin Grave has never once permitted a room to see. “Because I have been standing at that window running every version, and every version ends the same way. My wife. My sons. My house. The three people I—” He stopped. His jaw locked down on the sentence and held it.

The unfinished sentence stood in the room with us.

“Say it,” I breathed.

“The three people I chose to love,” he finished, flatly, laying each word down like a card he was losing, “sharing a bed behind fourteen doors and letting me carry up breakfast trays.”

The trays. Out of everything, the trays. I watched it cost him, and something in my chest tore along an old seam.

“Father.” Rowan stepped forward, level, hands open at his sides. “The fault has an order to it. If you want to assign it, start with me. I went to her first. Months ago. Before the trays. Before the fire in your study. Whatever punishment you are weighing, it starts at me.”

“No.” Ryker moved up beside him. “It starts at me. The date was mine. The rain was mine. He followed a door I opened.”

“You are both wrong about the order,” Rowan cut back at him, and there it was, the two of them turning on each other with the instinct of men who would rather absorb a blow than watch the other take it.

“Stop.” Corvin’s voice cracked across the room, and both his sons went silent, twenty-six years of that voice doing its work. He moved his gaze between them, and his hands came from behind his back, and I saw they were not entirely steady, and he saw me see it and did not hide them, which frightened me more than shouting would have.

“You think I am asking who touched her first.” He shook his head slowly. “I have known for weeks. The staircase. The perfume doing the work of a regiment. I am old, not blind, and I did my arithmetic the night I came home. What I am asking is different, and I want the answer from her.”

He turned to me fully.

“I sat in this study and asked if you wanted to properly be my wife. You crossed the room and answered me. Was that pity, Amaris.” His voice dropped, and dropped again, down to the register where he keeps the things that can actually break him. “Was I a kindness you were performing. An old man being managed by three younger people who had already arranged the truth of this house among themselves. I can survive almost any answer you give me this morning. I am not certain I survive that one.”

The study went absolutely still.

Ryker’s eyes came to me. Rowan’s eyes came to me. The fire ticked in the grate, and outside the window the training yard shouted about something, young and oblivious, a world away.

And I understood that the next thing spoken in this room could not be small, and could not be witty, and could not be managed, because this man had asked me the one question underneath all his questions, and he had asked it with his hands unsteady, in front of his sons, with nothing left over his face at all.

The truth. The whole architecture of it. The thing even Ryker and Rowan had never heard me say plainly in one sentence, in daylight, out loud.

I stepped forward, out from between his sons.

“No,” I answered. “It was not pity. And before you decide what this morning means, there is something about your sons and me that you do not know. Something none of us built and none of us chose.”

Corvin’s eyes narrowed.

“Then say it plainly,” he ordered. “Plain is always better.”

I took a breath from somewhere down at the floor of myself.

“They are my fated mates, Corvin. Both of them.”