Julia, his love, his one.
His Chosen.
She lay there for a long while afterward, saying nothing, only gazing into the depthless darkness of her lover’s eyes, memorizing every plane of his face, every angle, the long aristocratic nose and the finely sculpted curves of his lips and the sooty sweep of his lashes.
At last she said softly, “I love you.”
Did he know how much it had taken for her to tell him that? Because she’d told Ian she loved him — but had she, really? — and it hadn’t mattered. Her love had only been a weapon she’d willingly handed over to him.
But Zahrias was no Ian. She knew that, and yet —
“I love you,” Zahrias said. The words were hardly more than a whisper, but they were enough. The truth of his feelings seemed to echo in every syllable. “You are the one I have wait
