“You can talk to me.”

I almost laugh. I’m not sure this man could handle my past. But more than that, he gave me this past of mine. “I will never tell you my burdens.”

He closes the distance between us. “You’re lying again.”

I search his face. “Why do you try so hard with me when you so obviously don’t with anybody else?”

“Your heart has always been mine. I knew it from the moment I met you. I try because I cherish what is mine.”

“I don’t believe in love at first sight.”

He laughs. “I’m not talking about love, Serenity.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

He shakes his head. “Something else. Something poets know more about than I do.”

I hate to concede anything to Montes, but I felt it, too. Maybe not the moment I met him—I had too much hate for that. But when I caught sight of him on the flat screen when I was the Resistance’s prisoner, I still recognized him in a way that had nothing to do with memory.

“I will never forgive you,” I say.

“I don’t want forgiveness from you. I never did.” His hand slides to mine.

My beautiful nightmare. That’s what he is, what all of this is—the nightmare I can never wake from. And it doesn’t frighten me any longer.

I take one look as the stars. “They’re waiting for me. You know, they might be even more powerful than you.”

“Who are you referring to?”

“The dead.”

The king appears unnerved by my words. “I didn’t know you were superstitious.”

“I’m not.” I sit down in the sand. The king joins me.

“Superstitions are nonsensical,” I say, slinging my arms over my knees. “I’ve seen a person’s soul leave their body. You can’t not believe once you see proof like that.”

“Is that what you’ve been dwelling on out here? All the people you’ve killed?”

“All the people you’ve killed.”

The king leans back on his elbows and stretches his body out. My eyes linger first on his chest, and then those long legs of his.

“Throwing blame around doesn’t change the fact that they’re dead,” he says.

“Dead, yes. But gone? No, they’re not gone.” If anything they are more present than ever. The dead haunt my memories and my dreams; I’ll never be free of them. That’s the penance you pay when you take a life.

Montes glances over at me, and lounging back on his forearms, he’s the poster boy for irreverence. “Let the past go,” he says. “Be happy.”

I stare up at the lonely stars. “I don’t know how.”

WE SIT NEXT to each other in the sand for who knows how long, and somewhere along the way Montes sits back up and his arm finds itself around me. I pretend I don’t notice. Better that than to admit I might actually enjoy him holding me close.

“Now that you no longer live in the bunker, have the stars lost any of their allure?” Montes asks.

I shake my head and smile. “None. If anything, they’ve gotten more beautiful.”

When I look over at him, he’s already watching me. The intensity of that stare makes me acutely aware of myself. Sometimes, like right now, I believe that if the king could, he would drink me up and swallow me whole just to absorb every single bit of me into him.

It’s disconcerting, to say the least.

I glance back up at the sky to shake my strange awareness. Amongst a sea of unfamiliar constellations, I see a dear one.

“Want to know a secret?” I ask.

“Of course,” Montes says. “If it has anything to do with you, I’m interested.”

I will give the king this: he never does anything half-assed. Especially not when it comes to pursuing his cold wife.

“I have a favorite constellation,” I admit.

In the moonlight, I see him raise an eyebrow. “Which one?”

I lean into him, for once uncaring at our closeness, and point far above me. “Do you see that cluster of dim stars?”

“The Pleiades?” the king says.

I nod and wrap my arms around my legs. “My mother taught me about that constellation. The Seven Sisters. She said those were the wishing stars. That if you wanted something badly enough, you need only to wish upon them and it would come true.”

Montes is flashing me a rueful grin. “And have you ever?”

I give him the side eye. “Once or twice.”

“What did you wish for?”

The end of the war. The end of my sorrowful life. “Things I won’t admit to another soul.”

“Not even to me?”

Now I laugh. “Especially not to you.”

He pushes me back into the sand and rolls over me. “Why not?”

We’re gazing into each other’s eyes, and now I see the night sky in his irises, and I can only imagine what he sees in mine.

“Because you’re my enemy, and you don’t tell your enemy your secrets.”

He captures my hands, like I knew he would, and presses them into the sand on either side of me. “But I’m also your husband, and you do tell your husband secrets,” he says, threading his fingers through mine.

“You’re going to have to force them out of me.”

“Oh?” His interest is piqued. “Lucky me,” he removes one of his hands from mine to slip it into my robe, “I know exactly the type of torture my wife likes best,” he says, cupping a breast.

“Stop referring to me in the third person.”

“Or what?” His lips are just an inch away from mine, and his voice is husky. “You’ll really never tell me your secrets?” He thumbs my nipple as he taunts me.

Already my breath has quickened. “I sleep with my gun. You’d do well to remember that.”

“And you know I’ll take that gun away from you if I feel like you’re abusing your power.”

I guffaw. “Do you seriously want to get into a debate about the abuse of power?”

He laughs low in his throat. “I don’t want a debate at all.”

He takes my mouth then, his lips gliding against my own. I like to think myself a complicated, toughened person, but it never takes Montes long to pull me apart piece by piece.

I press my torso into his, and now he releases my hands so that he can skim his along my skin.