Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Ten

What the Library Keeps Quiet

Elianne’s POV

She found Gabriel in the library long after the ball had ended, long after the candles in the great hall had been allowed to burn down to nothing and the last of the guests had finally taken themselves home. She had not gone looking for him deliberately, or told herself she hadn’t, drawn instead by the simple excuse of wanting a book she couldn’t sleep without, but some part of her had known exactly whose company she’d find there, in the one room of the palace that had quietly become theirs over the past month of searching through ledgers and treaty records together.

He hadn’t changed out of his evening clothes. The formal coat hung open at the collar, and he’d clearly been running a hand through his hair with some regularity, the careful court styling from earlier in the evening abandoned somewhere in the last hour. He looked up when she entered, and something in his face shifted at the sight of her — not surprise, she thought. He had been waiting, in the same half-admitted way she had been seeking him out.

"Couldn’t sleep?" he asked.

"I rarely can, lately." She crossed to the shelf she’d been pretending to need, very aware of him watching her the entire way. "What’s your excuse?"

"My uncle handed me a glass of wine tonight and told me grief makes poor company. I find I haven’t been able to stop turning the conversation over since." He set down the book he’d been holding without reading, she suspected, for some time. "It’s a strange thing, suspecting someone you’ve loved your entire life. I don’t recommend it."

She abandoned the pretense of the shelf and came to sit across from him instead, in the chair that had become, without either of them deciding it formally, hers. "I’m sorry. I know I’m the reason that suspicion exists at all."

"You’re the reason I finally let myself look at something I should have questioned months ago." His voice was quiet, rough at the edges in a way she’d learned to recognize as honesty rather than performance. "I don’t resent you for that, Elianne. If anything, I think I should have thanked you for it already, and haven’t found the right way to say so."

* * *

They sat in a silence that stretched longer than was strictly comfortable, the kind of silence that asked a question neither of them had quite worked up the courage to answer aloud. She watched the candlelight move across his face, the scar along his jaw, the particular tiredness that had settled into him over the past weeks and never fully left, and felt something in her chest that she had been carefully refusing to name since the night of the dinner, when his hand had found hers under the table and she’d gripped back instead of pulling away.

"Gabriel." His name came out softer than she’d intended. "What you said tonight, at the ball. About my not being only a treaty anymore."

"I meant it."

"I know you did. I think that frightens me rather more than I’d like to admit." She made herself hold his gaze, even as everything in her wanted to look away from how exposed the admission left her. "I buried one man I was supposed to marry, Gabriel. I don’t know how to want the next one without feeling like I’m betraying the first."

Something moved across his face at that — understanding, she thought, rather than hurt, the particular recognition of a man who carried the exact same guilt himself and had simply never said it aloud before. "I think about Adrien every single day. I think about him when I look at you, more than I want to. I don’t think wanting you is a betrayal of him, Elianne. I think the betrayal would be pretending I don’t, and building a marriage out of that pretending instead of whatever this actually is."

"And what is this, exactly?"

He rose from his chair and crossed the small distance between them, slowly, giving her every opportunity to stop him that she didn’t take. "I think it’s the thing I’ve been failing not to want since before either of us had any right to want anything at all. I think it’s considerably less complicated than either of us has been pretending, and considerably more frightening for exactly that reason."

* * *

When he kissed her, it was not the desperate, hungry thing she might have expected from a man who’d spent weeks holding himself so carefully in check. It was slow, almost unbearably so, his hand coming up to rest against her jaw with a gentleness that undid her considerably more thoroughly than urgency would have. She felt the careful composure she’d worn for a month — through the funeral, through the announcement, through every careful, watchful conversation since — finally c***k all the way through, and she let it, kissing him back with a hunger that surprised her with how long it had clearly been waiting underneath.

He pulled back first, just far enough to rest his forehead against hers, both of them breathing harder than the moment alone seemed to justify.

"I’ve wanted to do that since the garden," he admitted, his voice rough. "Possibly longer. I haven’t let myself examine how much longer."

"That’s an admission that should probably frighten me."

"Does it?"

She considered the question honestly, searching herself for the fear that should have been there — the guilt over Adrien, the danger circling them both, the conspiracy that had already claimed one prince and clearly hadn’t finished. She found all of it, exactly where she’d left it. She also found, sitting beside the fear with a stubbornness that refused to be reasoned away, something that felt unmistakably like wanting this, wanting him, more than she had wanted to admit even to herself.

"Less than it should," she said finally. "I think that frightens me more than the thing itself does."

He laughed softly at that, the sound low and warm against her skin, and kissed her again, gentler this time, as though sealing some unspoken agreement neither of them had said aloud yet but both of them had clearly already made. Outside, the palace had gone fully quiet, the last of the ball’s candles finally burned to nothing, and for the first time since the steward’s knock on a gray autumn morning that felt now like another lifetime entirely, Elianne let herself simply have this, without calculating what it would cost her later.

* * *

They sat together afterward, her head against his shoulder, his arm settled around her with a kind of careful possessiveness that should have unsettled her and instead felt, against every expectation, like coming to rest somewhere she’d been circling for weeks without admitting it.

"We still have to find Pierre," she said eventually, the practical part of her mind reasserting itself even as she made no move to leave the comfort of his shoulder. "And we still have to decide what to do about your uncle, whatever the truth of him turns out to be."

"I know." His voice was quiet, steady, the same controlled calm he carried into council chambers, though softer now, worn at the edges by the hour and by what had just passed between them. "I haven’t forgotten any of it, Elianne. I don’t think either of us has the luxury of forgetting, not for long. But I find I don’t want tonight to only be about that. Just this once."

She tilted her head to look up at him, and something in his expression — open in a way she rarely saw from him, the careful composure set aside entirely for this one private hour — made her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with grief or fear at all.

"Just this once, then," she agreed. "Tomorrow we go back to being careful."

"Tomorrow," he said, and pressed a kiss to her temple that felt, somehow, more intimate than the one before it had been. "Tonight, I think we’ve earned this much."

She did not disagree. She let herself stay exactly where she was, listening to the quiet crackle of the dying fire and the steady, unhurried rhythm of his breathing, and thought, for the first time since the clearing, that whatever came next — the conspiracy, the danger, the long, uncertain road toward whatever truth waited at the end of it — she would not be facing it alone.

It was not a small thing, she realized, sitting there in the dark with a man she had not chosen and had somehow come to want anyway. It was, perhaps, the largest thing either of them had been handed since the morning the lilies fell from her careless hands and the world tilted sideways beneath her. She let herself hold it, for just this one quiet hour, before the careful weight of tomorrow came looking for them both again.

* * *

End of Chapter Ten