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Elena's POV

I stood outside the door.

Every part of me went cold at once.

The husband who had sworn to love me all his life and to always be gentle with me was saying he would divorce me.

Only because his memory had come back.

I was so cold I almost believed I had misheard.

Then what were the five years we had spent side by side every day?

I didn't know how long I stood there.

A memory from a long time ago surfaced.

We had not been together long back then.

I loved sneaking up and hugging him from behind.

Cassian was a vampire, with far sharper senses than a human.

So I never once succeeded.

One time I took off my shoes, went around through the hallway, and crept up behind him.

I had barely reached out before he turned and caught me in his arms.

I smacked his shoulder in frustration.

"Did you peek?"

"No."

"Then how did you know again?"

Cassian looked down at me and smiled.

"If you're anywhere near me, I can feel you."

"What if I'm in the next room, with a wall between us?"

"Of course I'd still know."

I pretended to be annoyed and swung my legs, trying to get down from his arms.

"So I'm never going to be able to startle you? Ever?"

He held me a little tighter.

"Never.

"Whenever it is, wherever you are, I will always be able to feel you."

And now.

I was standing right outside his door.

A few steps away from him.

Cassian had to know I hadn't gone far.

Which meant he had made no attempt to keep those two sentences from me.

He had said them for me to hear.

I looked down.

A corner of the pale grey shirt showed at the top of the bag.

My nose stung all at once.

Maybe it was because his memory had only just come back.

Maybe his family was putting enormous pressure on him.

Maybe there was more behind that betrothal than I knew.

Five years.

We had been together five whole years.

I knew he had loved me.

None of that could simply disappear because he got his memory back.

I stood outside the door for a long time.

I waited for the people inside to leave, and they looked me over strangely as they went.

In the end I took a deep breath and forced the tears back.

...

By the time I pushed the door open, nothing showed on my face.

Cassian was bent over a document.

At the sound he glanced up at me.

I went to the bed.

Everything I had prepared out in the corridor tangled itself into a knot in my head.

In the end, I could only ask in a daze, "Cassian, when you're discharged, we're still going home together, aren't we?"

Cassian looked at me.

The smile I had forced onto my lips was about to fall apart.

The scar on my stomach ached faintly.

Three years ago, I carried his child. A union between a human and a vampire is difficult to begin with, and my baby made it to eight months but never got to see the world.

Cassian had held me then and said that even without a child, no matter what, we would be a family.

All he had to do now was nod, and I would forget everything I had just heard.

I would convince myself that he hadn't said it for me to hear.

Instead, he visibly went quiet. Then he shook his head.

"Elena, you must have heard it just now. My memory is back, so I am divorcing you."

There was nothing on his face but a detached calm as he said it. I was the only one frozen, stubbornly holding up the corners of my mouth, my face caught somewhere between a smile and tears.

"I know you're in a difficult position. You're lying to me, aren't you?"

I tried to keep my voice steady.

"Your memory comes back and the prince immediately sends all these people. Does the betrothal involve your family's interests, so you have to agree to it for now?"

The more I said it, the more reasonable the explanation sounded to me.

"It's all right.

"I can wait while you sort things out at home."

"Elena."

Cassian said my name.

I fell silent.

"No one is forcing me to honor the betrothal, and I am not lying to you."

He leaned back against the headboard, his face expressionless and his eyes indifferent.

"The betrothal was arranged when I was a child.

"Seraphina's family and mine settled it a long time ago."

My fingers closed hard around the handles of the bag.

"But you're already married. To me."

I was talking faster, the words coming out in the wrong order.

"We've been married five years, and we've been happy the whole time."

Five years of love overturned and wiped away in a single night.

I couldn't accept it. I stared into Cassian's eyes, trying to find one trace of the tenderness I knew.

His gaze stayed perfectly level.

He was almost looking at me the way you would look at someone unhinged, with a kind of weary patience.

"I know. But my memory is back, and everything should return to the way it was meant to be."

That calm hurt worse than standing outside the door had.

I would rather he had told me he had forgotten the five years.

At least then I could lie to myself that too much of his past had come back at once and he had temporarily forgotten how to love me.

But he remembered everything.

He remembered that we were married.

He remembered every day he had lived with me.

And he could still sit here this calmly and say, without a flicker, that he was divorcing me, that he was going back to honor the old betrothal, that he was returning to the way things were meant to be.

I held the smile up, not wanting to fall apart in front of him, but my voice was shaking.

"Cassian.

"Yesterday, before you lost consciousness, you said that once you healed, we'd go to that bakery together.

"You said that for our anniversary this year you didn't want anything, you just wanted to stay home with me all day.

"Do you remember any of that?"

He nodded without much interest. "I remember."

My eyes burned.

"Then why don't you want me anymore?"

Cassian's brow drew in a little.

Almost on instinct I reached out, wanting to touch his face and kiss him the way I always had.

My hand had barely lifted before he turned his head aside.

My hand froze in the air.

The face was exactly the same as my loving husband's, yet the man behind it would never look at me tenderly again.