Eris tried to say something, to reclaim her anger, to tell him he was being ridiculous, but his arms tightened around her, preventing the words from forming. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, breathing her in.
"No one," he said, his voice muffled by her hair. "No one in this world, or any other, can understand… what you have just given me."
When he finally pulled back far enough to look her in the eye, Eris saw everything he had never been able to say.
She saw the specific, hollow loneliness of the child he had been, the boy who grew up in the shadow of a throne with no siblings, no warmth, and no one who belonged solely to him.
She saw the fantasy he had kept so privately that he'd barely admitted its existence to himself: the idea of a family. Not a political alliance, not a line of succession, but people who were his.
