The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(51)

She saw him and didn’t understand how she had ever missed his beauty. How it didn’t always strike her as it did now, like a blow.

“No,” Kestrel whispered.

“What?” Ronan’s voice cut into the quiet.

“I’m sorry.”

Ronan swiveled to find the target of Kestrel’s gaze. He swore.

Kestrel walked away, pushing past slaves bearing trays laden with glasses of pale gold wine. The lights and people blurred in her stinging eyes. She walked through the doors, down a hall, out of the palace, and into the cold night, knowing without seeing or hearing or touching him that Arin was at her side.

*

Kestrel didn’t see why carriage seats had to face each other. Why couldn’t they have been designed for moments like these, when all she wanted to do was hide? She took one look at Arin. She had given no order for the carriage lamps to be lit, but the moonlight was strong. Arin was silvered by it. He was staring out the window at the governor’s palace dwindling as the carriage trundled toward home. Then he tore his gaze from the window with a sharp turn of the head and sagged against his seat, face filled with something that looked like shocked relief.

Kestrel felt a flicker of instinctive curiosity. Then she reminded herself bitterly that this was what curiosity had bought her: fifty keystones for a singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn’t her friend, someone who was hers and yet would never be hers. Kestrel looked away from Arin. She swore to herself that she would never look back.

Softly, he said, “Why are you crying?”

His words made the tears flow faster.

“Kestrel.”

She drew a shaky breath. “Because when my father comes home, I will tell him that he has won. I will join the military.”

There was a silence. “I don’t understand.”

Kestrel shrugged. She shouldn’t care whether he understood or not.

“You would give up your music?”

Yes. She would.

“But your bargain with the general was for spring.” Arin still sounded confused. “You have until spring to marry or enlist. Ronan … Ronan would ask the god of souls for you. He would ask you to marry him.”

“He has.”

Arin didn’t speak.

“But I can’t,” she said.

“Kestrel.”

“I can’t.”

“Kestrel, please don’t cry.” Tentative fingers touched her face. A thumb ran along the wet skin of her cheekbone. She suffered for it, suffered for the misery of knowing that whatever possessed him to do this could be no more than compassion. He valued her that much. But not enough.

“Why can’t you marry him?” he whispered.

She broke her word to herself and looked at him. “Because of you.”

Arin’s hand flinched against her cheek. His dark head bowed, became lost in its own shadow. Then he slipped from his seat and knelt before hers. His hands fell to the fists on her lap and gently opened them. He held them as if cupping water. He took a breath to speak.

She would have stopped him. She would have wished herself deaf, blind, made of unfeeling smoke. She would have stopped his words out of terror, longing. The way terror and longing had become indistinguishable.

Yet his hands held hers, and she could do nothing.

He said, “I want the same thing you want.”

Kestrel pulled back. It wasn’t possible his words could mean what they seemed.

“It hasn’t been easy for me to want it.” Arin lifted his face so that she could see his expression. A rich emotion played across his features, offered itself, and asked to be called by its name.

Hope.

“But you’ve already given your heart,” she said.

His brow furrowed, then smoothed. “Oh. No, not the way you think.” He laughed a little, the sound soft yet somehow wild. “Ask me why I went to the market.”

This was cruel. “We both know why.”

He shook his head. “Pretend that you’ve won a game of Bite and Sting. Why did I go? Ask me. It wasn’t to see a girl who doesn’t exist.”

“She … doesn’t?”

“I lied.”

Kestrel blinked. “Then why did you go to the market?”

“Because I wanted to feel free.” Arin raised a hand to brush the air by his temple, then awkwardly let it fall.

Kestrel suddenly understood this gesture she’d seen many times. It was an old habit. He was brushing away a ghost, hair that was no longer there because she had ordered it cut.

She leaned forward, and kissed his temple.

Arin’s hand held her lightly to him. His cheek slid against hers. Then his lips touched her brow, her closed eyes, the line where her jaw met her throat.

Kestrel’s mouth found his. His lips were salted with her tears, and the taste of that, of him, of their deepening kiss, filled her with the feeling of his quiet laugh moments ago. Of a wild softness, a soft wildness. In his hands, running up her thin dress. In his heat, burning through to her skin … and into her, sinking into him.

He broke away, barely. “I haven’t told you everything,” he said. The carriage jostled, swaying the weight of his body against hers, then away again.

Kestrel smiled. “Do you have more imaginary friends?”

“I—”