Unmarked: My Mate Refused, The Alpha King Didn't novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Still Angry

Thane didn't flinch.

"I was there," he said. "I told you so."

"You told me you felt something stand up in you and called it a headache."

"Yes."

"You felt it, and you had forty paces of hall to cross to reach me."

"I remember every inch of it."

"And you walked out."

His jaw went tight.

"I thought you'd chosen him," he said. "You were smiling."

"I was smiling because the whole hall was watching me, and my father had his hand on my back."

I heard my own voice shake and I hated it.

"You had a hole open in your chest for eight months, and I had a fever. We were both dying of the same thing, a hall apart, and you said nothing."

"Elsie."

"I almost died on a table in your infirmary before you opened your mouth."

"I came the minute I heard where you were."

"You came the minute I fainted at your feet."

He took that one standing still.

"You could have asked me at the Moot last year," I said. "You could have asked me at any gate, any road, any feast. You're the King. You could have walked up to a married woman and said, did you feel that too?"

"And if you'd said no?"

"Then I'd have said no."

"And if you'd said yes?" His voice dropped. "You were wearing his ring. What was I supposed to do with that?"

"Anything. Something."

"I'd have been a man dragging a wife away from her husband on her wedding night."

"I'd have been alive eight months sooner," I said.

It landed.

I watched it land, and for one second I wanted to take it back.

Then I didn't.

"You're right," Thane said quietly. "I was a coward about it. I'm not saying it again."

"Good."

"I'll say sorry as often as you want to hear it."

"I want to be angry first," I said, and I walked out of the gallery and left him standing in the light.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in Pippa's rooms, eating her honey cakes and not tasting them.

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