Once we were alone, I took his hand tenderly in my good one, mindful of his injuries beneath the thick gauze. “Are you all right?”
His laugh was soft. “No. Not really.”
“Have they given you any medication for the pain?”
I think he shook his head. It was hard to tell with all the dressings and wraps covering his face. “I’ve been so worried about you. I was certain you’d been killed. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was Grandmère…”
“I’m here. I’m all right,” I promised.
“I can’t believe…I still don’t comprehend what happened. I’ve been lying here, thinking everything over, and I just…It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“I don’t understand it all myself,” I confessed. He’d lost his entire family in one horrible day. His mother, his father, his grandmother, two brothers he’d barely even known. “But we’ll make our way through it. Together.”
His fingers slackened against mine, loosening his hold. “About that…Verity.”
A cold, hollow spot bloomed beneath my sternum.
“I…I can’t imagine you’d want to remain here, not after…everything. You’ve been poisoned and drugged, lied to and assaulted. I’d understand if you wanted to flee and forget everything about this place. Forget about me. Forget that we ever…” He let out a shaky breath. “Know that I won’t harbor any anger or resentment toward you.”
“For what?” I asked, unable to discern his meaning.
“For breaking off the engagement,” he clarified as if it were obvious.
I was surprised by how much his words stung. “Is that what you want?”
His sigh offered no indication one way or the other.
“Alex?”
“No,” he whispered, his voice quavering and on the verge of tears. “I don’t. But I…I didn’t go through everything you did. No one was trying to use me for…for…” He stuttered to a stop, a sob breaking. “For all of that.”
“But they were. He was. You were as much a victim of that as me.” I wanted to reach out and cup his face but I couldn’t see how to do so without causing pain, so I stroked the top of his arm instead. “I fell in love with you, not your family, not your title. I fell in love with the boy who makes my heart happy, who showed me a new way to watch the rain…All of the things that happened—those awful, terrible things—they haven’t changed that. That love hasn’t gone anywhere.”
The room was filled with a weighted silence and the longer it lasted, the greater my doubt grew.
“Ver—”
My stomach dropped, hearing Viktor’s favored nickname wet on Alex’s lips.
For a moment, Viktor was all I could hear, his laughter ringing out in the stairwell.
He struggled to sit up, breaking the word in two. “—ity, I can’t.”
I stilled, frozen in place. “Oh.”
I’d misunderstood.
I’d been so concerned with showing him how much I still cared, proving my devotion, that I hadn’t stopped to worry if he felt the same way. I’d never questioned if it all had been too much for him. If I’d been too much.
I released my hold, rocking the chair back, ready to flee the room, flee him, flee the boy who no longer loved me.
“I can’t,” he repeated, licking his lips. “I can’t.”
“I understand,” I murmured, choking back tears.
I needed to get away from him. I couldn’t bear for him to hear me cry.
He sighed. “It just…It makes me feel so weak.”
I paused my retreat, looking over my shoulder. “What does?”
“I should let you go, I know that. It’s the proper thing to do. The right thing to do.” Alex swallowed. “But I can’t.”
“You can’t?” I echoed softly.
He shook his head. “I can’t imagine my life without you, Verity. Or…I could, but I don’t want to. I don’t want you to go. I don’t wanted to be apart and I…” His voice cracked.
“You love me?” I asked, returning to the bed.
“I do.”
“And you still want to marry me?”
“Arina help me, I do.”
He reached for my hand and pressed a kiss softly onto my palm. In my mind’s eye, I saw him as the boy I’d first met upon my arrival at Chauntilalie, sitting outside the manor, waiting for me with sparkling eyes, a dazzling grin.
I remembered the mornings spent tracing out those eyes, that grin, over and over, filling pages.
The picnics by the lake, his laughter bright in the air.
The look of hope on his face as he asked me to marry him.
The way we’d held on to each other before everything had fallen apart.
The way I wanted to keep holding on to him now.
“Good,” I murmured. “Because I can’t think of anything I want more than you.”
“You do?” he whispered in disbelief.
“I do.” I brought his hand to my lips, mimicking his gesture, sealing my words with a fervent promise.
He let out a sigh, his fingers wrapping round mine in a tangled knot, impossible to break. “I do.”
Every bell in Bloem rang out as I made my way down the flower-strewn aisle to marry Alexander Laurent.
I was pushed there in a wicker wheelchair by Camille, smiling proudly. She’d decorated it with rock-roses and gardenias in the softest shades of pink we could find.
The healers had wanted us to wait, had begged and pleaded for us to hold off for a few weeks, but as Alex once said to me: when you know you’ve found your love, you act on it. Life is unpredictable, so you need to seize hold of what you love and cherish every moment together.
So just three days after the attack, we wed.
One of the sleeves of my dress had to be sliced open to allow for my cast, and Alex wore large spectacles with black-tinted lenses to protect his eyes, but when all was said and done, we were married and together, exactly as we’d wanted.
“This certainly isn’t how I’d envisioned our wedding night,” Alex admitted once we were brought into his chambers, after an intimate, subdued dinner with family and friends. Most of our invited guests had already begun their travels to Bloem on that terrible day, not realizing they would witness a wedding, then remain for five funerals.
The services were set for tomorrow.
Alex had decided both Viktor and Julien would be buried in the family earth, their remains joining generations of Laurents, accepted in death as they had not been in life.
“No?” I asked, stumbling from the bathroom toward the bed. I ought to have been nervous for him to see me so exposed in my new nightdress—a beautiful gown of thin lawn cotton, bedecked in ribbons and dainty stitching—but my ribs ached too much to worry on it.
Frederick had already moved Alex out of his chair, propping him up on a mound of pillows. He’d pulled the bedsheets over his chest and was looking in my general direction.
“It’s too dark to even see you,” he complained, removing the tinted glasses and squinting against the light of a single candle.
It was one of Annaleigh’s candles. The staff had taken pains to remove each and every one of Gerard’s pink tapers from Chauntilalie, burning them all—and every last canister of poppy tea—in a bonfire far from the house.