Chapter 201 Marry Me
ADRIANA
I slipped out of the hallway before Landon noticed I’d been standing there and walked back to the sitting room like I’d never left it. I sat down, crossed my legs, picked up the glass of water that had been sitting on the table and took a sip, and arranged my face into something that communicated nothing at all.
He came in two minutes later still wearing the expression of a man working through something in his head. He stopped when he saw me.
“I was looking for you,” he said.
“I was right here,” I said.
He sat across from me and the expression shifted into the one he wore when he was about to perform sincerity. I had seen it three times since I arrived and I recognized it the way you recognized a song you’d heard too many times — the opening notes were enough.
“I want to ask you something,” I said, before he could start. “Why me? After all this time and everything that happened, why is it still me?”
He blinked. He hadn’t expected me to ask first. Good.
“Sit,” I said, even though he was already halfway to sitting. He completed the motion and settled across from me and for a moment he just looked at me, and in that moment something moved across his face that was briefly real before he organized it into something presentable.
“You were the first woman who ever put me in my place,” he said. “I was eighteen and I thought I was the most important person in every room I walked into, and you bumped into me in a market and instead of apologizing you insulted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about you after that.”
What I had actually said was that he should watch where he was going before he knocked someone’s groceries out of their hands, which was not exactly a landmark moment of feminine power but had apparently landed differently on his end.
“I never grew up with a family,” he continued. “I didn’t know what it meant to have someone look at you like you mattered. You looked at me like I mattered. You were patient when I didn’t deserve patience and you were honest when everyone else just told me what I wanted to hear.” He paused. “I was stupid. I had exactly what I needed and I threw it away and I’ve spent more than a decade trying to understand why.”
The infuriating thing was that parts of this were true. The Landon I had known at twenty was not the man sitting across from me now. The man I had known was careless and proud and had a habit of making you feel chosen and then behaving as though choosing you cost him nothing. But he had also been the first person since my mother who had looked at me like I was worth looking at. That had mattered. It had mattered enormously.
None of that changed what he was doing now.
“So you love me,” I said.
“Yes.” No hesitation.
“And that’s why you took thirty children from their parents and held them in a stone room for months. Because you love me.”
His jaw tightened. “I did what I had to do—”
“Love isn’t enough,” I said. “I want you to hear that clearly. You could love me completely, genuinely, with everything you have, and it would still not be enough. Because love is not the currency I trade in anymore. I trade in trust. In history. In someone who chose me when choosing me cost them something real.” I held his gaze. “You don’t have any of those things.”
He stood up abruptly. I knew in an instant the performance was gone.
“What does he have that I don’t?” His voice had changed, lower, the practiced warmth stripped out of it. “He’s not even our kind. What could he possibly give you that I couldn’t?”
“Everything,” I said simply.
He laughed, but it came out wrong — jagged, with something bitter underneath it. He started to pace and I watched him and did not move.
“You were always like this,” he said. “Always thinking you were too good for what was right in front of you. Your father saw it. Lisa saw it. I tried not to see it but eventually I did.”
I kept my face still.
“You think I left you because I wanted to?” He stopped pacing and looked at me. “I left because of my father. He told me to end it. He said you’d never inherit anything from your father, that you were worthless to the family name, that being with you made me look weak. And I listened to him.” He sat back down heavily. “That was the biggest mistake of my life.”
So there it was. Not love. Not even real cruelty. Just a man who had done what his father told him and had been too much of a coward to admit it for twenty years and had constructed a mythology of love around it so he didn’t have to.
“You should have told me that,” I said.
“Would it have changed anything?” He actually looked hopeful.
“No,” I said. “But at least it would have been honest.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Marry me,” he said. “I know it’s not what you want to hear. I know you came here thinking you could manage me out of this and walk away with your son. But I want you to actually think about it. You’d have all of this. You’d be Queen. Your son would have a future here.”
“My son has a future,” I said. “He has a future with his father and his brothers and his sister and a pack that loves him. He doesn’t need anything from you.”
Landon leaned forward. “And if I said no? If I said Leo stays until you agree?”
I looked at him.
“Then you’d be making a significant miscalculation,” I said.
He opened his mouth to respond and I stood up first.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going to sleep. We’ll continue this tomorrow.”
I walked out of the room before he could find the words, which was intentional, and I went back to my room and sat on the edge of the bed. I reached Elijah through the mind link and let him know I was upright and thinking, and I started counting down the hours to four AM.
I won’t be here for that conversation Landon thinks he’ll have.