He doesn’t. He sets his jaw. “I don’t see that. Not at all. I see you being selfish the way you’ve always been selfish. You only care about yourself, and you never really—cared—about me.” His voice breaks over these last words and he turns away so I won’t see his face.
The words wreck me, seal me in pain and bury me in the mud of my own sins, but at the same time, they fucking infuriate me. How dare he accuse me of selfishness when he has no idea—no fucking idea—what I’ve done for him? The things I’m still doing for him?
I straighten up and say in as cold a voice as I can manage, “Merlin told me I couldn’t marry you.”
It takes a minute for the words to sink in. Ash turns back to face me, one hand braced on his desk as if he needs to steady himself. “Excuse me?”
“Back in Carpathia. When I was on my way to base after rehab, he sat on the train with me and explained exactly why we couldn’t be together publicly. If you truly love him, then there’s nothing you can’t sacrifice. I knew he was right—hell, an idiot could see that you were meant to be somebody great. And if it had been now, this year, I would have told Merlin to go fuck himself. But back then…Ash, back then I didn’t know if you could do the things you were meant to do if the world knew about us. And even last year when you proposed…this country might not have re-elected you if they knew you were bisexual, and how could I have that on my conscience? You throwing away your dreams for me? I hate it, I hate it, but I made a choice with Merlin all those years ago. Your future over ours.”
He’s really leaning on his hand now, breathing hard. “I don’t…you didn’t…you really wanted to marry me?”
“Christ, Ash, I would have torn down those mountains with my teeth if it meant I could marry you. I would have moved to Canada with you or out onto a horse farm—I would have done anything, gone anywhere. There were days when it was all I could think of, having you all to myself, not hiding, just belonging to you the way we both wanted me to. But I couldn’t. I can blame Merlin all I want—and I do—but it was my choice at the end. You had to come first.”
“You should have told me,” he says.
“You would have ignored me! You were always so stupid and noble like that. If I’d told you, you would have shoved your own future aside and we would be raising horses in Montana.”
“And would that have been so awful?” he asks brokenly.
“You wouldn’t have ended the war at Badon. We wouldn’t have Greer.”
At the mention of Greer, his face clears. Even in the midst of all this, his love for her burns clean and bright like a hungry flame.
“It wasn’t your choice to make,” he says, looking up at me. “I don’t need to be protected, I never asked to be lied to. Jesus Christ, Embry, all those years I thought—I thought you didn’t love me as much as I loved you. And it hurt, God, it hurt so much that I couldn’t breathe sometimes. It was like trying to catch my breath underwater. I lived with that for years. Years.”
This is not what I ever expected upon this revelation. In the loneliest moments of the loneliest nights when I fantasized about telling him the truth of why I said no, I never imagined this.
“A thank you might be nice,” I say, a bit sullenly.
“A thank you?” he demands, rounding on me. “You want a fucking thank you for breaking my heart? For keeping me in agony for years?”
“I was in agony too!” I say, my voice edging toward anger. “It killed me to do it, but I did it for you!”
“I never asked you to! You can’t blame me for something I never would have wanted you to do—a secret you never should have kept!”
I stare at him, real anger swelling my veins now. “You don’t even know what kinds of secrets I’m keeping for you, President Colchester, so you should be real fucking careful.”
He stares back, a muscle jumping in that perfectly chiseled jaw. “There’s something else you haven’t told me?”
Well, what the hell? In for a penny, in for a pound, right? Abilene be damned, Morgan be damned, all the sacrifices I’ve made over the last two months be damned. It’s worth throwing it all away to hurt Ash now, to hurt him the way he’s hurt me.
“Abilene is blackmailing my sister and me—to hurt Greer—but she’s blackmailing us with a secret you don’t even know you have.”
He waits.
I don’t make him wait long. “You have a son, Ash. With Morgan. His name is Lyr, and he’s fourteen years old. He has green eyes and black hair and a pretty face—he should, shouldn’t he? Since he gets it from both sides, after all.”
Ash buckles. Actually buckles, barely catching himself with a hand on his desk. He’s hunched over the top, his eyes closed. “No, I would have known, she would have told me, there would have been something…”
I’m shaking my head even though he’s not looking at me. “She was on birth control that week in Prague, but she got sick that one night, remember? It was enough. And when she came back to Carpathia, she was coming back to tell you. She was three months pregnant when you chose to let her burn in a church. Can you blame her for not telling you afterwards? That you had almost killed your own child too?”
His breath catches on that old guilt, and I see I’ve opened a fresh wound. Good.
I continue. “My mother convinced Morgan to let our aunt Nimue raise the boy as her own, and Morgan agreed. That’s what Abilene threatened us with. She was going to go to the press with it all—that you planted a baby inside your own sister and then nearly killed them both. Morgan couldn’t bear the thought of Lyr being so publicly shamed by all this, and she begged me to help. So I accepted Abilene’s deal: her silence for my part in her quest to hurt Greer, because I knew the truth about Lyr would cause so much more damage than a few months of Greer thinking I actually liked Abilene. See, I, unlike you, am capable of making difficult decisions in order to protect her.”