Chapter 171

SAINT.

"I need you to stop thanking me," I said in a low, rough voice.

"I need you to stop thanking me because I don't deserve it, Eve, and I need you to know that I know that." I held her hands tighter. "I blackmailed you. I dragged you into my world by the throat under the guise of 'leverage,' and I told myself it was justified because you had stolen from me, and disrespect has consequences, and I had rules and you had broken them." I stopped. "That was a lie I told myself because the truth was too inconvenient."

She was very still.

"The truth is... The moment you walked into this house, and I recognised you, something happened in my chest that I had no framework for. And it fucking terrified me. So, I did what I always do when something terrifies me." I looked up at her. "I turned it into a weapon. I made it about control because control was the only language I had ever learned to speak, because every person who was ever supposed to teach me a different language either left or was taken or decided I was too damaged to practice on."

I felt her hands tighten around mine.

"I used your fear," I said. "Deliberately. Consistently. I watched it work on you, and I told myself it was necessary, and I never once let myself look directly at what I was doing to a person who had done nothing to deserve it except steal a watch from a man she didn't know at a club one night because she needed money." I shook my head. "You were never the villain in this story. I made you feel like you were so that I didn't have to feel like the one who was."

"Saint—"

"I'm not finished, babe," I said gently. It felt like the first time I had ever said anything gently in my life. "I watched you fall for Kyrie. I hated him for it. I hated you for it. And I hated myself most of all because underneath all of it I knew — I fucking knew — that what I wanted was for you to look at me the way you looked at him. And instead of doing a single thing that might make that possible, I made myself into the reason you couldn't even stand to look at." I paused. "That is the stupidest thing I have ever done. And I have done genuinely stupid things."

A sound came out of her that was half laugh and half sob, and it cracked something open in my chest.

"I am in love with you," I said.

The words came out stripped of everything that should have been Saint Rollins.

"I have been in love with you since before I had the language for it, and I spent every day we shared doing everything in my power to make sure you never found out because love felt like the one vulnerability I couldn't afford, and you felt like the one person who could actually use it to destroy me." I looked at her face. "I was right about that, by the way. You could destroy me. You're the only person alive who could. I've known that for a long time."

She was crying openly now and not trying to stop it, and I kept going.

"The elders want me to reject you," I said. "The curse wants me to reject you. Meryk, pack law, every reasonable reading of the situation I am currently in — all of it is pointing at the same door and telling me to walk through it." I shook my head slowly. "I am not going to do that."

"Saint, the consequences—"

"I know the consequences," I said. "I sat in that hall, and I looked every elder in the face, and I told them this was my regime now and I would change the law." I held her gaze. "I meant every word of it."

"But your curse. The cure—"

"Is gone," I said simply. "I know that too." My chest tightened, but I spoke through the tightness, "I know what I am walking toward. I know what it costs. And I need you to hear me when I tell you that I would walk toward it ten times over rather than stand in front of you and say the word reject."

Her face crumpled. "But what consequences will there be if the curse isn't broken?"

I stared into her eyes for a second longer than necessary, and lied. I fucking lied.

"There is no consequence."

Her brows narrowed like she didn't believe me. But I didn't explain further, and I didn't even let her dwell too much on it.

"Whatever time I have left," I continued, "I am going to spend it making sure that you know — every single day of it — that you were chosen." I pressed her hands against my chest. "Chosen. By me. Freely. With full knowledge of every reason I shouldn't have been capable of it."

She sobbed hard.

"I'm sorry," I said. "For all of it. For the beginning of it and the middle of it and every specific moment in between where I chose fear over honesty and called it strategy." I looked up at her without blinking. "You deserved better than what I gave you. You deserved better than both of us, if I'm being truthful. But you're here, and I'm here, and I am done wasting whatever time is left being the man who was too proud to kneel."

The room was completely silent.

I looked at her face and for the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like to have nothing left to hide behind.

It felt like standing in an open field in a storm.

"I am sorry, Eve," My voice cracked on those last words, "Please, forgive me."

I said the words nobody in our realm had ever heard me say in thirty years of living in this body.

She broke into fresh sobs as she slid off the bed and joined me on the floor with her arms around my neck.

"I forgive you, Saint," she whispered against my neck. "I do."

Something happened inside me when she said it.

I don't have the right word for it. I have never needed the word before because I have never been in a place that required it. It moved through my chest like something that had been locked in a very small space for a very long time and had just been given room to breathe for the first time. And the sheer size of it now that it had room was almost more than I knew what to do with.

"Thank you," I said, and my voice came out barely above a murmur, stripped of everything except the plain truth of it.

I pulled her into my arms, pressing my face into her hair as she cried against my chest.

Relief. Peace. Calmness. And other emotions I couldn't name flooded me all at once.

I hadn't felt this way before.

I had spent thirty years building walls against exactly this - the unbearable vulnerability of being seen all the way to the bottom and not being left there.

It was so new and so strange that I had no category for it, no drawer to put it in, no framework that could hold it without buckling under the weight of what it actually was. It didn't feel like anything I had ever felt before. It felt like a language I had never spoken, suddenly making sense in my mouth.

I didn't know what to call it.

I only knew that I never wanted it to end.