"Then tell me everything," Kael said, settling into the chair across from her desk, the same careful formality he usually wore at court entirely absent from his posture now. "Not the version the sealing ceremony required you to perform. The truth, Elira, whatever it costs either of us to hear it."
Elira studied him for a long moment, weighing, as she had weighed everything for six years, exactly how much of herself she could safely reveal even now, even to a man who had just crossed a kingdom to ask the question directly. But something in his exhausted, unguarded expression told her this was not a moment for careful half-truths. If their marriage had any honesty left worth salvaging, it would need to begin here, in this small receiving room, with the whole of what she had hidden since chi
