Vampires Can't Have Children, So I Left Carrying the King's Triplets novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: What We Didn't Say

"Four hours," Eileen said, and shut us into a servants' room at the end of the library wing.

It had a narrow bed, a washstand and a lock that Merrick tested twice from the outside.

I sat on the edge of the mattress and could not stop my hands from shaking.

Bastian stood by the door with his coat off and his left arm held tight against his ribs.

He was burning with fever, and he did not look away from me once.

"You don't have to walk in there," he said.

"Yes, I do."

"I will not let you offer your throat to a man who did what I did."

"It's my wrist, Bastian. And you don't get to let me do anything."

He took that.

"Then say what you came in here to say," he said. "I have been waiting nine days to be shouted at."

So I shouted.

"You never asked me why I stopped coming to the Bride's Table!"

"No."

"A whole year I walked into that room and sat there while your cousin said it to my face."

"Elspeth."

"You had a hundred and seventy-five years of knowing everything. You never once asked me why I came up the stairs crying."

"I didn't know you were crying."

"Because you were in the tower! Nine weeks you were in the tower!"

"I thought you were afraid of me."

"And you signed. You didn't call. You didn't climb one flight of stairs and knock."

"I know."

"I would have told you everything if you had knocked."

His jaw worked.

"My turn," he said, very low.

I stopped.

"A year, Elspeth. A year in my house, and you never told me what they said to you. Not once. Not on the worst night. I would have burned that table."

"I was proud."

"You were alone, and you let me think you were content." His voice cracked. "And when the papers came, you signed in under an hour. Under an hour. I stood in that tower and counted it."

"I signed because the doctor had just told me I had three babies the Court would take away!"

"I know that now. I did not know it then."

"Neither of us knew anything."

"No."

We stood four feet apart, breathing hard.

Then I crossed the floor and hit him in the chest with the flat of my hand, on the good side.

He caught my wrist and held it there.

His heart was pounding under my palm.

"Terms," he said, rough. "You gave me terms."

"I did."

"No bed."

"Then I'm breaking it."

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