Chapter 356 He Said Watch Me

She was waiting for the man she had just openly defied to tell her there would be consequences. Gavriel could feel it. He could feel everything she was feeling, which he assumed was because Tristan was bonded with her.

Tristan didn’t stop until they were in their quarters. He set her down on the ottoman gently. The way you set down something precious that you are afraid of breaking, which was an accurate description of the woman sitting in front of him, because she looked, in this moment, like she was already broken and was holding the pieces together through willpower alone.

Tristan knelt in front of her, dropping to his knees. Both of his arms locked around her waist and held her.

“Baby.” His voice was low and steady. “You do not need to worry. I am going to tell you something, and I need you to hear it.”

River’s hands stayed in her lap. Her tears fell on his forearms.

“There is no version of this where I go with her.” His arms tightened. “I do not care if every Fae in Aelindris lines up at our door and tells me I must. The answer is you. It has always been you. It will always be you. I love you, River.”

The words should have fixed it. In any other version of this moment, in any timeline where River hadn’t watched him die with a spear through his chest and a smile on his face, the words would have landed on her grief and dissolved it and she would have buried her face in his neck and believed him.

She couldn’t.

Because she had believed him before. She had believed him in a healer’s wing while dark veins crawled up his neck. She had believed him when he said he would rather die chosen than live with a woman he never wanted. She had believed every word, and every word had been true, and he had died anyway.

“Tristan.” Her voice was so small it barely reached him, even at this distance. “There has never been a king in the recorded history of Fae who has gone against a fated tie. This is what the Moon Goddess chose for you.” She swallowed. The swallow was audible. “I love you. I will love you for the rest of my life. But I will never be the obstacle between you and what fate intended.”

“You are my fate. I made you my fate. With my own hands—”

She shook her head.

The motion was small, definitive, the particular headshake of a woman who had been given the clearest possible preview of where this road ended and was refusing to walk it again, regardless of the fact that every cell in her body was screaming at her to say yes and hold on and let him fight and trust him the way she had always trusted him.

She couldn’t because she had seen the outcome. The outcome was a king dead under parley and his son impaled next to him.

Tristan tried again. “River, listen to me—”

“Please.” The word cracked. “Please do not make this harder.”

His jaw worked. His arms were still around her. He could feel her grief, her resolve, her love, her goodbye, all of it contradicting each other.

He didn’t accept it.

“I hear you,” he said, and his voice was low, measured, the voice of a man choosing his words with the precision of a commander selecting terrain. “I hear what you are saying, and I understand that you believe it. But you are wrong, River, and I will spend every day I have left proving it.”

“Tristan—”

“You asked me to hear you. I did. Now hear me.” He pulled back enough to look at her. “I will handle the elders. I will handle Vesper. I will handle every Fae in this realm who thinks they can tell me who my soul belongs to, because my soul decided that a long time ago, on a wall, and my soul has never once been wrong.”

“You cannot fight fate.”

“I have been fighting fate since I was ten years old and decided that a girl on a rock was mine to keep. Fate had every opportunity to stop me. It hasn’t. You are still here. And I am keeping you.” His hands tightened around her waist. “I am keeping you, River. That is the end of the sentence.”

She shook her head again. The tears were coming faster. Her grief was so heavy it was pressing on his lungs, and the goodbye underneath it was getting louder. Every instinct he possessed was screaming at him to dismantle that before it solidified.

But the woman in front of him was breaking, and breaking her further would make him the thing he was trying to protect her from.

He pulled her off the ottoman and into his arms.

She went. The resistance she had been holding in her spine, the composure she had been maintaining through sheer discipline, collapsed the moment his arms closed fully around her. She buried her face against his neck, and the sound that came out of her was small and wrecked, the particular sound of a woman who was trying to save the man holding her and couldn’t tell him what she was saving him from.

“I am going to fix this,” he said into her hair. “I am going to find a way that keeps you and keeps me and keeps every promise I have ever made to you. I need you to trust me.”

She didn’t answer. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his ceremonial whites, gripping with the desperate strength of a girl who had been holding onto him since she was six years old and was trying to let go and couldn’t do it while he was warm and real and breathing against her.

He carried her to the bed.

He laid her carefully, with both hands, with the reverence of a man who understood that the woman in his arms was the single best thing he had ever been trusted with. He climbed in beside her, tucked her against his chest, and wrapped both arms around her until there was no distance left.

River fought sleep, but the grief had drained her. The do-over had drained her. The act of standing between guards and the woman who had ruined her bonding ceremony had drained the last reserves she possessed, and her body, which had died on a field less than an hour ago in a timeline only she remembered, was done negotiating.

Her breathing slowed. The tears stopped. The tension in her shoulders released, one muscle at a time, until her body was soft against his and her face was still and her eyes were closed.

She fell asleep in his arms the way she always fell asleep in his arms: completely, as if his chest were the only place in the world where the girl on the rock felt safe enough to stop holding on.

Tristan didn’t sleep.

He lay in the dark with his eyes on the ceiling and his jaw set.

He could still feel her grief was still there, heavy and deep, a permanent weather system that had settled into her chest and was showing no signs of clearing. But the resolve had shifted. Underneath it was something worse: acceptance.

Quiet. Total. The acceptance of a woman who had already decided to let him go and was trying to find the strength to do it.

His arms tightened around her, and his jaw set harder, and the fire in his green eyes burned brighter in the dark.

She had accepted losing him was the only option left.

She was wrong.

His mind was already moving, already building, already constructing the architecture of a fight she didn’t know he was planning and would never see coming, because Tristan Aelindor had never accepted an outcome he disagreed with and was never going to start.

The outcome she had accepted was the one outcome he would burn this kingdom to the ground to prevent.

He would find a way.

Gavriel Sterling felt Tristan’s resolve in his own chest and knew, with devastating clarity that there was nothing River could say or do that would change his mind.