“Yeah,” Rafe muttered and cleared his throat, trying to bring a smile to his lips. “I, uh, couldn’t sleep. I’m going a little stir-crazy in here, I guess.”
Xander nodded absently. His eyes moved around the room as he swiveled slightly on the stool, pushing with his legs as his wings flexed and relaxed.
Rafe's voice was soft. “Xander?”
The prince half turned toward him, but seemed to be in another place entirely.
“Is there something you wanted to talk about?” Rafe coaxed. He couldn’t hear Lyana on the other side of the curtain anymore, but he supposed she was there, too curious by half to ever turn and fly away, and not nearly nervous enough to worry about being caught.
Xander sighed. “I just…”
He paused and turned to look out the window. If the princess was out there somewhere, she was in the shadows where neither of them could see.
“I was thinking tonight, while I couldn’t sleep,” Xander said. “I was wondering… What do you… Well, what do you suppose love feels like?”
Rafe froze.
But Xander kept rambling, unaware of how still his brother had become. “I mean, I know you’ve never felt that way yourself—me neither, of course—but I thought, maybe you might remember what it was between your parents? What it felt like to be around them?”
“I don’t—” Rafe fell quiet when a knot in his throat cut off the words. “I don’t know, Xander. I don’t remember.”
“You do,” Xander countered, not accusingly. His tone was honest, maybe edged with the slightest bit of sadness. “It’s fine, I understand. We don’t talk about them, not really. I just thought this one time we could. Because I know what love looks like. I’ve seen it in the streets as I walk through them, between mated pairs, but never from so close a distance that I could recognize that light in someone’s eye, that sparkle. My mother’s faded long before I was old enough to notice it, and her parents were lost before I was born. But yours…”
He trailed off with a shrug.
Rafe found himself avoiding Xander's probing eyes. “Why? Why do you want to know?”
Xander scoffed, catching Rafe’s attention as he gave half a smile. “I would think that’s obvious, Rafe. I am to be mated in a week.”
“That was true two weeks ago, too, and you didn’t ask me then,” Rafe argued, stubborn as always. But this was something more, a knife slowly digging into his gut, burning and painful. All he could think to do was grab the hilt and plunge it in more deeply, so at least the agonizing anticipation would end. Because he had to hear it—whatever it was, he had to.
“Something’s changed,” Xander said, almost mystified. He shook his head as the tips of his wings lifted. “I can’t explain it, really, but Lyana’s changed. The past few days she’s seemed, I don’t know, at peace in a way she hasn’t been before, at least with me. There’s something, a glow of some sort in her eyes, a smile always on her lips as though she just can’t keep the corners down. And I’m, well, I’m trying to understand why.”
The invisible blade twisted.
Rafe swayed on his feet before holding on to the wall to steady himself. He wondered if, outside, Lyana had done the same.
Xander didn’t notice. He just kept talking as one of his legs bounced against the stool in a frantic sort of way. “And I’m different too, Rafe, when I’m around her, I think. Lighter somehow. She’s, well, she’s nothing like anyone I ever imagined being mated to—as you well know. We’re different in so many ways, but I’m starting to think that doesn’t matter. And I’d like to tell her all of this, instead of you—no offense, brother—but I spent the last hour trying to think about what to say, and for the life of me, I can’t put this feeling into words. It’s not love—it couldn’t be, not in such a short amount of time. But if it’s not that, I don’t know what it is, or how to say it. I’m trying to understand, so that when I do talk to her, it goes better than this, because I can see I’m boring you, and never mind, I’ll just go back to my room and you can forget I ever came.”
The end of his ramblings only registered when Xander stood and began to shuffle toward the door.
“Wait,” Rafe said, jumping into motion. He grabbed Xander’s arm to detain him. “Wait. I—I remember.”
Xander turned slowly, eying him expectantly.
Rafe closed his lids as the memories washed over him, a dam set free, a rushing torrent he didn’t know how to control once it started. Oh, he thought of his mother often. The arms that used to wrap him up tightly. The voice that used to sing him to sleep. The laugh that was so infectious he would always laugh along with her, even in the middle of a tantrum. He thought of the two of them, alone in their room at the very bottom level of the castle, separate from the rest of the world, but it hadn’t mattered, because they had everything they needed. The stories they’d create. The games they’d play. The love that had filled that room, so incredibly powerful it had stayed with him long after she’d passed—but that wasn’t the love Xander was talking about.
No, the love she’d shared with his father had been different.
Rafe tried not to think about them—well, he tried not to think about his father—because whenever he did, he felt guilty. Guilty for those words that had been the king's last. I won’t leave you. I won’t leave our son. He’d died for loving Rafe more than Xander, for loving his mother more than the queen. And though he’d been little more than an innocent child, Rafe was exactly what the queen still called him—the bastard who had stolen so much from her son, who had stolen the meaning of love away and was now stealing something much greater.
“Love,” Rafe murmured, remembering the way his parents would look at each other in that small room, how they would tease and sometimes fight, how they would dance like fools with him between them and then slow down as though he weren’t there, how his mother would let her hair down and his father would remove his crown, and they’d be exactly who they were, for a little while at least. That feeling of freedom, of not having to hide, of being woven so closely nothing could ever undo them, that was love. And for a moment, Rafe pictured green eyes in the dark and two hands folded over one another, gold and silver sparking between them. But he blinked the picture away and turned to his brother, a hollow feeling growing cavernous in his gut. “Love is when you find a piece of yourself in someone else, a piece you never knew was missing, but without which you'd be broken. You feel whole, and complete, and accepted for exactly who you are. You can be your true self, because around this person, for the first time you have no desire to pretend to be anyone else.”
Xander stared for a moment too long, brows quivering in the slightest frown, before he carefully cleared his features. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience. Your own experience, I mean.”
Rafe tensed.
His gaze flicked to the curtains, then slid along the carpet until it reached his brother’s shoes. Drifting higher, he finally settled on the violet streaks of uncertainty in his brother’s eyes. The air was thick and full and heavy, pressing on him from all angles, prickling his skin.