Chapter 177 The End Is Here

Chapter 177 The End Is Here
Ryn POV

The contract finally ends on a Tuesday, which feels like it should be more dramatic than it is.
There's no ceremony. No paper that bursts into flame, no shift in the air.

Eldridge simply comes to the chamber in the morning and tells us, in the flat voice he uses for facts, that as of dawn the blood contract between the human called Ryn and the crown of Valdris has expired and is no longer in force.

Then he leaves, because Eldridge has always understood when a room needs to be empty.
And I sit there and realize I'm free.

Not free the way I imagined it all those months, counting down to this day like it was a door out of a prison. Finally at long last, I'm free. It was only just yesterday that I willing entered a contract to save someone I thought was worth saving now, after so long, it's over and I barely made it alive.

No contract. No obligation. No curse clock running, at least not for now just the long one waiting at the end of the pregnancy. No court trying to vote me out, no coalition, no Vael, no home in the human world that was ever really home.

For the first time since the night a vampire king came through a cellar wall, there is nothing in any world that requires me to be in this room.
I could walk out the door. Cross the Borderlands. Go anywhere. And nobody could stop me, because the thing that bound me here stopped existing at dawn.

Zevran is watching me work it out. He's leaning against the window, very still, the way he gets when something matters too much to let it show, and I understand that he's having the same realization I am, from the other side of it.

The contract was the thing that kept me here. It was the cage, but it was also the rope. And now it's gone. We're both looking at the fact that everything between us from the beginning was built on top of a thing that no longer exists.

"You can go," he says quietly like he's making himself say it. "I want you to hear me say it, so you know it's true and not a thing you have to wonder about. The contract's gone. You're not mine, you're not the court's, you're not held by anything. If you want to leave, I'll open the Borderlands myself and I won't say a word to stop you. You've earned the right to choose without a single thing pressing on the choice."

"Even carrying a baby that's keeping me alive?"

"Even then. We'd find another way. I'd find you healers in the human world, I'd..." He stops. "I'd manage it. If leaving is what you want, I won't make the curse the thing that traps you here the way the contract did. You've been trapped enough. I'm done being one of the walls."

And the thing is, he means it. I can see he means it. The man who told me I belonged to him like a horse, who said he wouldn't cross the Borderlands for me and we both knew it was a lie, is standing at the window offering to open that crossing with his own hands and let me walk through it.

That's how I know.

"What if I refuse?" I whispered and watch his eyes find mine.

"But why? You've been..." his face is tight and the look of confusion is all over his face.

I don't want to go," I whisper quieter than I normally would.

"You should think about it before you..."

"I've had months to think about it. I thought about it the whole time I was deciding to leave. I even planned the speech. I was going to ask you to come to the human world with me, did you know that? That was the plan, before the Renewal, before all of it. I was going to stand in this room, tell you I was leaving and ask you to leave with me." I shake my head. "And now the contract's gone, I'm free and I could go anywhere, yet the only place I can think of that I'd actually want to be is wherever you are. So I'm not going. Not because I have to. Because there's nothing out there I want more than this."

He moved to where I was slowly, then takes my hands, and for a second neither of us says anything because we've never once stood here without something forcing us to.

There's always been a wall. This is the first time it's just us, choosing, with the walls gone.

"Then choose it properly," he says. "I tried to do this once, in the throne room, and Seraphina's contract took it out of my mouth before I finished. I'm not going to give a long speech, I've made enough of those lately and you've started looking at me sideways when I do." he takes a deep breath, eyes still fixed on me. "Marry me. Not to break a curse, not to settle the court, not because a contract says you're mine. Marry me because there's no reason left to except that you want to. That's the only reason I want it to be."

I look at him, trying to figure out how I got this lucky. We literally started on a rocky start, see us now. Even with a baby on the way, a baby that's technically not his, he still wants me.

"Yes," my eyes immediately fills up with tears without hesitation.

I don't make him wait for it the way Sorin made me wait, I don't laugh, I don't second-guess. I just say it, because for once in my life I'm sure of a thing, and being sure is so rare for me that I'm not going to waste a second of it pretending otherwise.

He kisses me, and it's not the desperate kind or the grieving kind or any of the kinds we've had in this room before.

And underneath all the warm and fuzzy feeling, when we pull apart, I catch something cross his face. A flicker. The same thing I saw in his study the day I came home from Vael's, the thing he started to say before Eldridge opened the door. It's still there.

Whatever it is, he's still holding it, and for half a second I almost ask. But I don't because I'm happy. There'll be time. We have months. Whatever he's not telling me can wait the way my own secrets waited.

I put it down and let myself just be a woman who said yes, freely, for the first time, to the only person in any world I'd choose with nothing forcing the choice.

The curse still waits at the end of the months. I might not live to wear whatever they put on me at a vampire wedding. But I'm choosing this knowing that, choosing him knowing the clock is still running, and somehow that makes it braver than if it were safe.

Free, for one whole day. And I spent it choosing to stay.