She released the pendant faster than she would have released a burning ember.
“I don’t understand. I don’t—” She choked on a sob. She felt like she was drowning, and desperation was clawing at her, her lungs trying to breathe, but there was no air left. “Why can’t you even try, Evret? Why can’t you even try to love me?” Crossing the room, she knelt before him, taking his hands into hers. “If you would just let me love you, let me show you that I could be the wife you wanted, that we could—”
“Stop. Please, stop.”
She gulped.
“You’re always so desperate to make this work, to turn our marriage into something it isn’t. Haven’t you ever just stopped to wonder what else might be out there? What you might be missing out on by trying so hard to force this to be real between us?” He squeezed her hands. “I told you a long time ago that by choosing me, you were giving up your chance to find happiness.”
“You’re wrong. I can’t be happy—not without you.”
His shoulders sank. “Levana…”
“I mean it. Think about it. We’ll start over. From the beginning. Pretend that I’m just a princess again, and you’re the new royal guard, coming to protect me. We’ll act like this is our first meeting.” Suddenly giddy with the prospect, Levana leaped back to her feet. “You should start by bowing to me, of course. And introducing yourself.”
He massaged his brow. “I can’t.”
“Of course you can. It can’t hurt to try, not after everything we’ve been through.”
“No, I can’t pretend that we’ve never met, when you’re still…” He flicked his fingers at her.
“Still what?”
“Still looking like her.”
Levana pursed her lips. “But … but this is how I look now. This is me.”
Dragging his hand over his coiled hair, Evret stood. For a moment, Levana thought he was going to play along. That he would bow to her, and they would begin anew. But instead, he shuffled around her and turned down the blankets on the bed. “I’m tired, Levana. Let’s talk about this more tomorrow, all right?”
Tomorrow.
Because they would still be married tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. For all eternity, he would be the husband who had never loved her. Wanted her. Trusted her.
She shuddered, more afraid than she’d been in a long, long time.
After so many years of wrapping herself in the glamour, it was nearly impossible to let it go. Her brain struggled to release her grip on the manipulation.
Heart hammering, she slowly turned around.
Evret was in the middle of pulling his shirt over his head. He tossed it on the bed and looked up.
Gasping, he stumbled back a step, nearly knocking a glowing sconce off the wall.
Levana shrank away, wrapping her arms around her waist. She ducked her head, so that her hair fell over half her face, hiding what it could. But she resisted the urge to cover her scars with her hands. She refused to pull up the glamour again.
The glamour he had always loved.
The glamour he had always hated.
At first, it seemed that he wasn’t even breathing. He just stared at her, speechless and horrified. Finally, he closed his mouth and placed a shaking hand on the bedpost to steady himself. Forced down a gulp.
“This is it,” she said, as new tears started to leak from her good eye. “The truth that I didn’t want you to see. Are you happy now?”
His blinks were intense, and she could imagine how difficult it was for him to hold her gaze. To not look away, when he so clearly wanted to.
“No,” he said, his voice rough. “Not happy.”
“And if you had known this from the beginning, could you ever have loved me?”
His mouth worked for a long time, before he responded, “I don’t know. I…” He shut his eyes, collecting himself, before meeting her full on. This time, he didn’t flinch. “It’s not the way you look, or don’t look, Levana. It’s that you have controlled and manipulated me for ten years.” His expression twisted. “I wish you would have shown me a long time ago. Maybe things would have been different. I don’t know. But now we’ll never find out.”
He turned away. Levana stared at his back, feeling not like a queen at all. She was a stupid child, a pathetic girl, a fragile, destroyed thing.
“I love you,” she whispered. “That much has always been real.”
He tensed, but if he had any response, she left before she could hear it.
*
“Come here, baby sister. I want to show you something.” Channary smiled her warmest smile, waving Levana over excitedly.
Instincts told her to be cautious, as Channary’s enthusiasm had turned into cruelty before. But she was hard to resist, and even as Levana’s instincts were telling her to back away, her legs carried her forward.
Channary knew better than to use her gift on soft-minded children, especially her young sister. She’d been scolded by their nannies a hundred times.
In response, she’d only gotten more secretive about it.
Channary was kneeling before the holographic fireplace of their shared nursery, the gentle warmth in contrast to the roaring flames and crackling logs in the illusion. With the exception of celebratory candles, fire was strictly forbidden on Luna. The smoke would too quickly fill up the domes, poisoning their precious air supply. But holographic fireplaces had been popular for some time now, and Levana always liked to watch how the flames danced and defied predictability, how the wooden logs smoldered and crumbled and sparked. She would watch them for hours, amazed at how the fire seemed to always be burning low, eating into the logs, and yet never went out altogether.
“Watch,” said Channary, once Levana settled beside her. She had set a small bowl of glittering white sand on the carpet, and now she took a pinch of the sand and flicked it at the holographic flames.
Nothing happened.
Gut tightening with apprehension, Levana looked at her sister. Channary’s dark eyes were dancing with the firelight.
“They’re not real, right?” Leaning over, Channary passed her hand through the flames. Her fingers came away unblemished. “Just an illusion. Just like a glamour.”
Levana was still too young to have much control over her own glamour, but she did have a sense that it wasn’t exactly the same thing as this holographic fireplace.
“Go ahead,” said Channary. “Touch it.”
“I don’t want to.”