“Why?” Savannah’s voice was cold as ice.
Why am I here?Rohan managed a smile this time. “Why do you terrify me? How long do you have?”
“Why won’t you let me go?” This time, Savannah’s voice came out halfway between an accusation and an ache. “I was done. Why won’t you let me be done?”
Love was a thing that happened to some people, but Rohan didn’t want to be a thing that happenedtoSavannah.What choice did we have? Right from the start, love, what choice did either one of us have?
So he gave one. “One last wager,” Rohan proposed, “and if you win, I will leave, and you need never see or hear from me again.”
“It’s always one more wager with you.”
“Three questions. I will ask you three yes-or-no questions. Get them all correct, and you win.” Rohan didn’t give her a chance to negotiate those terms before unleashing the first of his gambits. “When I was six years old, did I bludgeon a grown man to death with a rock?”
Savannah stared at him. “Dark water. You couldn’t swim.”
“Yes or no, Savannah?”
“Yes.”
Rohan looked down. “For the longest time, I thought I’d killed my mother, too.”
For the longest time, anything soft or warm, anything safe or real had felt like a trap. “I was his leverage against her, and she was his leverage against me, but when I made sure he couldn’t hurt either one of us ever again, she looked at me likeIwas the monster. She pushed me away, and I have been pushing people away ever since.”
This was Rohan on his knees.
This was him offering her his throat.
“What’s your second question?” Savannah’s expression was impossible to read.
Countless, shattered versions of them stared back at Rohan as he answered. “When I believed your life to be at stake, did I sign away the Proprietorship—the Mercy—to save you?”
The blood seemed to drain right out of Savannah. She shook her head. Something like vulnerability flickered in her wintery eyes, but it didn’t last as she shook her head a second time, staring bullets in him.
“Is that your final answer, love?”
“Youson of a bitch.” Her fury was a thing to behold.Shewas.
“Answer the question, Savannah, yes or no?”
Savannah Grayson was many things, but she was not a coward. “You wouldn’t be asking,” she bit out, “if the answer was no.”
“And thus,” Rohan said, memorizing her eyes, her voice, the way she stood, “by the process of elimination, the answer is…”
“Yes.” She said that word like she hated him for making her say it, like she ached with the truth of it and hated him for that, too.
“Yes,” Rohan murmured back.Yes, he’d chosen her. Back when he was still a coward, back when he could not let himself feel a fraction of what he felt now, he had chosen her. “You told me once,” Rohan continued, “that you do notwantthings, that you set goals and achieve them—but Iwant, Savannah, and I always have.”
“I gave you what you wanted.” Savannah closed her eyes, and when she opened them, there was fire behind the ice. “I gave you youreverything.”
You are my everything, Rohan thought, but the second he opened his mouth, she came at him.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, her face less than an inch from his. “Don’t you say it.”
Rohan took Savannah’s hand in his. “You decide,” he said, brushing his lips over her knuckles. “Not me.” He eyed a bandage on one of her fingers. “Little thing’s still biting, I see.”
A quiver passed through Savannah’s body, and a moment later, she ripped her hand from his. “Leave.Right now, Rohan, or so help me—”
“You have to answer one more question,” Rohan said quietly. “A deal’s a deal.”