“Nobody on Megaris is without sin. It is impossible to breathe this air without becoming corrupted. In your case, your sins were forced upon you and buried in your mind. You are not responsible for what you did. Krush will pardon you. It is a formality."
She looks at me with those wide eyes. “Is that it? I get away with everything?"
"You get away with nothing. You will not be out of my sight without being caged away. You will be my very well-loved little pet."
She takes a moment to digest that, curling into my arms and frowning in the way she does when she is thinking deeply. I give her the time to process all her complex little human thoughts, knowing that this will not be easy for her.
“You knew all along.”
“Yes. I did.”
“How? I mean, how were you so sure? It would have made far more sense to blame Mark than me. I was nobody. He was an angry, vicious man with alien technology in his closet.”
“I knew by the way you were looking at your husband after he threw the sandwich. You were not afraid. You were not angry. You were cold and determined. If I had not killed him, I am almost certain that you would have.”
“I really don’t think I would have.”
“I believe you would have, and I began to love you in that moment. There is nothing more satisfying or morally correct than killing someone who desperately deserves it. You were made something you never wanted to be by someone who hurt you. And now you are becoming something different again. You are becoming mine. Forever.”
Margaret
“Yours forever?”
“Yes. The truth is out between us. There is nothing to impede us. I know who you are. You know who you are. You are strong. You are a survivor. You are a human from another world who has navigated the courtly intrigues of Megaris with true adeptness. You deserve to be my mate.”
Now it falls to me to say the hardest sentence I have ever allowed to pass my lips.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Excuse me?”
“I… I love you, Tusk. But I always wanted to have a family. And you’ve rejected your own son.”
He sits back, snarling. “You withhold your affection to bribe me to forgive the most incompetent fuzkin’ soldier in the history of Megaris?”
“No. I want a family, Tusk. I want to have that family with a mate who loves his family and would never reject them. Rath never did anything to you. He may have made mistakes, but… I don’t understand how you could turn your back on him.”
“I never turned my back on him. Why do you think he was not executed when the king he was supposed to be guarding died? I saved him. I even allowed him to leave Megaris and had him brought back in glory. I have given Rath every opportunity to succeed and to be great. And at every turn, he has chosen that human over his own self-interests. For her, he betrayed his king, he betrayed me. That is why Rath and I are not currently on speaking terms.”
“I want a family, Tusk.”
Tusk
She repeats those words, and I feel the crushing weight of the loss of a love I am yet to truly live weighing on me. She wants a family, and not any family. She wants a happy family, a loving family. She holds all the dreams of the human world in her heart, and there is nothing any of my brutality can do to change that. I may have freed her from her abusive husband, but that does not mean she will give herself to me.
“Very well. I will get Tyvian.”
“Tyvian?”
“He will guard you.”
I leave the room, feeling an old bitterness I never expected to be flooded with so soon. We were on the verge of happiness. She gave her body to me. I thought she had given her heart too. Now I feel more than rejected. I feel foolish. I feel like a much, much younger man having assumed far too much of the feelings of a female.
Every step feels like a humiliation. I feel as though the eyes of all the palace are on me. As if every noble, courtier, soldier, and royal knows what has happened.
Tyvian is not hard to find. He is in his dungeon, as always. He emerges from his private quarters as I enter his little realm.
“Here to gut me, Tusk?”
“Margaret would like to be escorted to your dungeon. You can find her in the medical bay.”
He looks surprised, but he does not make any comment. He is smarter than that.
“As you wish. When will you be coming to retrieve her?”
I do not answer that question.
I go home.
Thirteen
Three weeks later…
My home is more empty than it has ever been. I have lost three wives over the years. I have watched my sons grow and leave home, most never to return. Rath stayed close, but only to embarrass me.