In War, There Is Love

Not Enough

“Are you insane? Are you bloody insane, Maya?! Have you lost your goddamn mind?”

Maya sighed. This was going worse than she had imagined it, and the worst was that she didn’t feel like she owed Nolan any explanation. Anything. They weren’t together. She had made it clear to him from the very beginning.

“Nolan, you’re giving me a headache right now.”

“You are going to marry the f*****g Vampire! How can you be this calm?!” He kept pacing in the room, pulling his hair, throwing things against the wall from time to time.

“Nolan, I swear to God, if you do not stop right now—” She was cut off by him suddenly rushing to her and cupping her face with his hands. The movement softer than it had been intended, and it did nothing to her heart.

“How could you accept this? How could you do this to us?” His voice sounded pained, his hands trembling, ironically, since she was the one actually marrying the one man they feared even mentioning the name of.

“There isn’t an us anymore,” Maya said it as softly as she could, which wasn’t really that soft. Slowly, she put a short distance between them. “There wasn’t an us before too, Nolan. You knew from the beginning I didn’t intend to marry you. Nor you or anyone else. You just expected me to change my mind.”

“You are marrying him,” he spat the last word as if even mentioning his name would cause Nolan physical pain. And Maya hated how this was suddenly a competition.

She wasn’t a prize. And she wasn’t going to get won, not by her angry lover and most definitely not by the Vampire King, no matter she was going to become his wife in a few weeks.

“Unwillingly,” she only chose to answer.

Nolan sat on her bed and buried his face between his hands, suddenly starting to chuckle. “You could have stopped this if you really wanted to. Could have convinced your father to choose someone else in your place.”

Apparently he didn’t want to see reason, and Maya was growing irritated. All she wanted was for him to leave her room and leave her alone so she could think. Process all this.

“The Council of Peace decided it was going to be me,” she explained between gritted teeth. “King Demetrius apparently declared war if it was someone else in my place.”

“Why?” He stood up again. “Has he ever seen you? Does he want you?”

“You’re losing your mind. And now I want you to get out,” Maya demanded, walking to the door and opening it so he could leave.

“Maya,” he groaned, looking pained again. When she thought he was finally going to leave, he closed the distance and brought his lips to hers in a bruising kiss.

And Maya hated every second of it.

“Stop,” she demanded, tearing herself away from him. It made her nauseous. “Get it over your head. This is over, I am now engaged to someone else.”

Realization walked through his face. “This is it. This is why you didn’t try to stop this marriage as much as a sane woman would.” He looked half like he had found a treasure in the depth of the ocean, half pained, half disgusted. “This exites you.”

She blinked. “What...” But the words got stuck in her throat, which didn’t happen very often.

“You want to actually meet him. You literally requested to be the ambassador before King Silas chose Lord Hold’s son instead.”

“Being the ambassador and being his wife are two very different things.” But her voice didn’t come out half as confident as she wanted it to be.

Was he right? Did she, somehow, deep, deep in her subconsciousness, want to face him? The man that was rumored to have people die just by looking at him?

He intrigued her. Maya had always known this, but...

“You don’t want to play it safe, do you? You were playing it safe with me? Am I too boring for you? Too sane, too predictable?”

“Get out,” Maya whispered.

“You’ll regret it, Maya. You’ll want me back. I am the only one who accepts you the way you are. Every dark part of you. I know something has happened to you in the past—”

“Get out, Nolan.”

“I know that is the reason why you are like this. This... harsh, this manipulative. And no one will like that except for me—”

Maya closed the distance between them until they were face to face. She was taller than him anyway. “Get out, Nolan, or I will show you every dark part of me. And trust me, you won’t like any second of it.” It was a threat. She knew it, Nolan knew it. And she meant it.

Right when he was about to leave, he turned back and held her gaze. “I love you, Maya,” he said, but she slammed the door in his face.

That wasn’t love.

And if it was love, she didn’t want it.

“Go to hell, Nolan,” she said between her teeth, pacing inside the room, reality hitting down in full force.

She was going to get married to him. Him. King Demetrius. To the monster of the Kingdom of The Dead. And she was going to live among them. Among predators that would look at her like she was the next meal that would send them to heaven.

A shiver ran down her spine to the memories, but she blocked them out of her head like she always did.

A nightmare.

Just a nightmare. Not true, not true, not true.

“Maya?” A head of light brown hair sneaked inside the door without knocking. “How are you?”

If there was one thing she genuinely liked about her home, that was her half-sister Lea. Bubbly, smiley, innocent Lea. So different from her, but somehow she had been the only one of her many siblings that had accepted Maya since the first time she had stepped foot inside this castle.

Yet now Lea was the last person Maya wanted to see. The last person she wanted to be angry at. Because it wasn’t Lea’s fault, no matter how unfair it was.

“I don’t want to talk,” Maya simply said.

Lea usually got that as a sign to leave her alone, but now, unfortunately, she only stepped inside the room and closed the door behind her. “I saw Nolan leave. Was he angry?”

It was funny how that was the first thing her sister asked. Of course, she was taught to please her future partner since she was a child. She was a Faerie Princess after all, and faeries were the most dedicated kind when it came to mates. Mates were sacred. There had never been a faerie in their world that had ever been fated to another outside of their kind, and Maya was sure there would never be.

And Maya having a lover in the first place had been a scandal enough as it was.

“I don’t care what he was, Lea.”

Her sister let out a sigh. “You’re right,” she paused before asking, “Are you scared?”

Was she scared?

Strangely no. Angry mostly. At herself and at her father in equal measures.

At her people, too, for not giving a damn about her even when she had been the one preventing the war with her strategies all this time.

At the Vampire King for brutally killing the ambassador when he could have prevented all this.

“Would you be?”

Lea nodded her head almost violently. “Of course I would be. Everyone would. He’s crazy. Sick in the head. He’ll kill you, Maya.”

Maya laughed. She didn’t know why she had the habit of laughing in the worst kind of conversation. “He will not.”

He could be crazy, Lea was right, but he was far from stupid. Maya had studied his war strategies for years, since she had started working to become a member of the Council she would no longer be part of.

The Vampire King wouldn’t kill her. He didn’t want to announce war to them either.

If he was smart enough—and he was—he would want to use her to get information about the faeries’ Royal Court.

Not that he would get any, of course. If he expected a fragile, scared little faerie, he’d be disappointed.

“You should have fought father harder,” Lea insisted, again with the same thing Nolan had said, just in different words. “Father would choose another bride if you didn’t accept this.”

“Who?” Any resemblence of softness left Maya’s voice. “Who, Lea, tell me? You? Or one of our dear sisters? You’re smart enough to know he’d never give one of you to King Demetrius. You are the precious Princesses of the Court. I am the black ship of the family. I am the outsider.”

“Maya...” There were tears in her sister’s eyes Maya was sure she would regret later, but she was too angry to do so right now.

“Leave, Lea.”

“Don’t say that.” Now Lea was full on crying now. Perfect. The roots of guilt already started spreading inside Maya’s chest but she didn’t let it show in her face. “You know that I love you.”

“Not enough, Lea.” For the first time in years Maya felt something prick behind her eyes, but the tears didn’t come anyway. “Not enough.”