"Everyone in that chamber heard the ancestors." Her throat tightened, but she pushed through. "And I have been tearing myself apart trying to figure out a version of this where no one gets hurt, and there isn’t one, Dex."
He didn’t interrupt. His thumb moved in slow circles against her hip.
"You deserve soone who is completely yours. Not soone who is split in half. Not soone who wakes up carrying guilt she can’t put down." Her eyes burned, but she managed to hold her tears back. "I can’t be the reason you lose yourself trying to hold on to sothing I can’t give you in full."
Silence stretched between them. Long enough for her to hear his breathing change. Long enough to feel sothing shift through their matebond that wasn’t hers.
"Are you done?"
She blinked. "What?"
"Your speech. The real one, not the brunch version." He tilted his head. "Is there more, or can I talk now?"
"I’m serious, Dex."
"So am I." His hands found hers, lacing their fingers together, and he held on with the grip of soone who had done the math on letting go and rejected every answer.
Sothing flickered across his face. Not amusent. Sothing sadder. Sothing that looked like recognition, like he was watching her do sothing he’d already seen coming and had been dreading.
"Let guess," he said. "You convinced yourself that walking away is the noble thing. That if you remove yourself from the equation, everyone heals and the math works out."
He was reading her the way Velkaris read the sky before a storm.
"Serena." His voice dropped. "No one is making you choose right this second."
He hated the words, but he needed to say them.
Her chin trembled. She locked her jaw to stop it.
"The self-sacrifice thing is very noble and very stupid, and I say that with love and the full understanding that you could probably kick a severed head at right now with perfect aim."
"You don’t understand," she whispered, and her voice cracked on the last word, shattering the composure she’d practiced. "Every ti I look at you, I think about what this is costing you. And every ti I look at him, I think about what it’s costing him. And I am the common denominator in both of those equations. I’m the variable that doesn’t balance."
"Wrong."
"I’m not wrong."
"You are catastrophically wrong." He caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger. Gentle. But deliberate. Tilting her face up so she couldn’t look at her hands or the sheets or anywhere that wasn’t him. "You are not a variable. You are the entire equation. And I am not going to let you subtract yourself from it because you think that’s what we need."
A tear slid down her cheek before she could stop it.
He caught it with his thumb. Didn’t wipe it away. Just held his hand there, warm against her jaw.
"The ancestors said both matebonds are real," he continued. "I was standing right there. I heard every word, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I’m also not going to compete with Fin by asking you to erase him. That’s not a fight I need to win, because it’s not a fight."
"It’s a problem, Dex."
"No. It’s you, trying to solve a problem that isn’t yours to solve alone." His grip on her hands tightened. "And it’s telling you to stop."
She stared at him. The tears were falling freely now, and she’d stopped trying to stop them, which was its own kind of surrender.
"I don’t have an answer," she said. "I don’t know how this works. I don’t know how to be what both of you need without destroying one of you in the process."
"You don’t need an answer tonight."
"Dex."
"You don’t." He pulled her forward until her forehead rested against his. "I don’t need you to have it figured out, Serena. I need you to stop running." His thumb traced along her cheekbone. "That’s it. That’s the whole ask."
"I’m not running. I’m trying to do the right thing."
"The right thing isn’t leaving." His voice was certain. "I watched you walk away from once. When you thought I chose Agnes. And it nearly killed ."
She flinched.
"I’m not going anywhere." He held her gaze with the unshakable clarity of soone who had considered every alternative and found them all unacceptable. "You can try to push away. You can rehearse a hundred more speeches. But I will still be right here."
She pressed her face into his neck and her shoulders shook.
Dex’s arms went around her. One hand at the small of her back. The other cradling the back of her head, fingers threaded through her hair. He held her the way he always held her, like she was the only thing in the world worth being still for.
Aegon:Good. She stays.
Dex:Not now.
Aegon:She stays. That is the only acceptable outco. I have reviewed all other outcos and rejected them.
Dex:I said not now.
Aegon:Tell her we are not leaving. In case she missed it. Say it again louder. In Draken-Vorah.
Dex pressed his lips to the top of her head and held them there.
"I don’t know how to fix this," she said into his neck, voice muffled, still shaking.
"I know."
"I don’t know how to stop feeling guilty."
"I know that too."
He pulled back just enough to look at her. She was a wreck. Eyes red, cheeks wet, white hair sticking to the tears on her face, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in days because she hadn’t.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and she was trying to leave him for his own good, and she had offered him brunch as a consolation prize.
He loved her so much it made his chest ache.
"If you try this again. I’ll kiss you until you forget what you were saying. It worked twice already."
A wet, reluctant laugh broke out of her. Short, surprised, half a sob folded into it.
"That’s not a sustainable strategy."
"Agree to disagree."
She shook her head, pressing her forehead back into his shoulder. He let her stay there. He wrapped both arms around her and held on, chin resting on top of her head.
"Okay," she whispered.
It wasn’t the answer to the question that had been eating her alive since the ancestors laid both matebonds bare in front of every person she cared about.
But she wasn’t pulling away.
That was enough.
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