now

Greer is attending the debate with me, and I can’t find it in my heart to wish her elsewhere. I want her close, I want her near, and as much as I don’t want her to see what comes next, I take a small cinder of comfort in knowing that Embry will be here. He will take care of her afterwards, and she of him. I think back to my phone call with Merlin last night and swallow.

I should take pride in what will happen after I die. Take joy, even. This is all new, all different from my other life.

For once, at least two of us will have a happily ever after. And perhaps the letter I gave Merlin this morning to mail to Seattle will give Lyr some closure as well. I only had the chance to be his father for such a brief time, but I still want him to know that I treasured that time, that I loved him, and that I have every bit of faith in him and his future. All the things I never had a father tell me.

The pre-debate process is much the same. Makeup, notes, bustling. Merlin is there, silent like me, as Belvedere and Kay talk. They don’t know. No one knows except us, and I have a flash of empathy for Merlin. How has he borne it all these years, knowing things no one else did? Knowing horrible, ugly sins and terrifying futures?

It’s a very lonely feeling.

Finally, Greer is kissing me for good luck, and she looks surprised but happy as I seize her close and kiss her hard, sliding my tongue between her lips and tasting her to my satisfaction. When I let her go, I take her left hand in both of mine and hold it to my chest. “I love you more than life itself,” I say quietly, seriously. “And I always want you to be happy. Watching you and Embry love each other has been the greatest joy of my life. My love for the two of you exists inside your love for each other—when you love each other, you are loving me. Promise me you’ll remember that.”

“Ash, I—” Her brow is furrowed and her eyes are frantically searching mine.

“Say, yes, Sir, I promise.”

She pulls her lips into her mouth, then lets out a long, worried breath. “Yes, Sir, I promise.”

I kiss her forehead and walk away. If those are to be her last words to me on this earth, then I can’t imagine any better ones.

Yes, Sir, I promise.

Thank God. If I go through the trouble of dying tonight only so that Greer and Embry spend their lives apart out of some misguided sense of honor, I’m going to be one furious Sir. A dead Sir, yes, but still a furious one.

And then it’s time to go backstage and wait for our cue to enter.

Embry comes to stand next to me. “Brought enough Secret Service agents?” he asks quietly, so Harrison Fasse and the producer’s assistant can’t hear him.

“To keep you safe.”

Embry lets out a huff, half-annoyed, half-amused. “You saw the metal detectors and pat-downs happening to the audience right? The agents in here sweeping the place? The background checks for the television staff?”

“There are ways of getting around metal detectors, Embry, and backgrounds can be forged well enough to pass a check.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“Maybe.” I move past the producer’s assistant—a man about my age who looks distinctly irritated with my jostling and talking—so that I can angle my body against Embry’s. So that no one can see me take his right hand and check for the ring I put on his finger last night.

It’s not there.

My stomach twists in hurt even as I recognize I’m being ridiculous. What, did I expect he’d wear it on national television? The day after his wife’s funeral no less?

But then he says quietly, “Wrong hand.” And when he lifts his left hand, I see that he’s replaced his other wedding band with mine.

My throat closes and I can’t speak.

“It belongs there. It always belonged there, Ash. It should have been your ring from the beginning.”

“Little prince.”

“I know it’s hard to believe that I love you, that I need you still, even as I’m fighting you, but can you? For me? Can you believe it? Because I do love you, and even if I still want to finish this race, I’ll always kneel to you. Even if I win, I’ll still kneel to you. We’ve always loved each other like this—alongside the struggle and the fighting. We can keep doing it…I want to keep doing it.”

But this is the end, little prince. For me at least.

After tonight, I’ll have to let you and Greer go.

I don’t say that. Instead, as the moderator’s voice comes over the sound system and the audience begins their wave of polite applause, I say quickly, “Promise me you’ll love Greer as I do, that you’ll take care of her.”

For a minute, I think he doesn’t hear me over the applause and the churlish hustle of the assistant towards the stage, and then he is looking at me with a genuinely confused expression, his eyebrows pinched together and his mouth pulled into an elegant frown. “Ash? What are you talking about?”

“Just say it,” I beg, only a step away from the stage. “Just let me hear it. Please.”

“Okay,” he says slowly. “I’ll take care of her. But Ash—”

It’s too late—the assistant is pushing me onto the stage and into the bright lights and there’s no time to explain. There’s only time to smile and to wave and to hope that Merlin is wrong about tonight, about everything.

Please, God, let him be wrong.

I think of this afternoon as I take my podium, as I smile, as I search the room for danger and as I make all the subtle adjustments you’re trained to make—straightening your suit and finding the cameras and making sure your notes are in order. I think of how my hands shook earlier as I fixed my cufflinks and slid my tie bar into place, how it took me three tries to put that damn flag pin on my lapel. I spent years getting shot at, waking up on muddy hills thinking that day might be my last, and yet I’d never felt fear like I felt it this afternoon getting ready to meet my end.

Maybe because, despite everything, I believe Merlin. Maybe because if I don’t get this right, Embry could die.

Maybe because it means letting go of all that I’ve worked for—all the peace and prosperity I’ve tried to build—and having to trust it to the people I leave behind. I have to trust that they will hoist the banner for me after I’m gone, that they’ll keep doing the work, that the world will be and stay a better place in their care.

It’s the hardest thing to ask a Dominant, to let go of his control, and certainly the hardest thing to ask of a king—and I suppose that means it’s the most necessary thing to ask.

I think of the dreams that have been shining through my sleep lately, the dreams about that place over the water. The quiet lake and the drifting fog. I thought at first that it was Vivienne Moore’s lake, but now that my new memories have surfaced, I think it’s a different lake. One I’ve traveled over before, but not in this life.

Only I can’t remember the place over the water. Even now, that memory stays hidden from me.

The first question comes, and the debate truly begins and…it’s easy. Not like last time, when I couldn’t find my own words, not like the time before when my heart was twisting at the sight of Embry after two years apart. It’s almost like this really is a battle in truth, and the battle clarity falls over me like a cool cloak, and I feel light.

Free.

Ready.

Harrison makes a clumsy remark, which Embry leaps on gracefully, and it’s easy to spin both arguments into my own point, easy to speak intelligently and clearly as I keep my eyes searching the periphery of the stage, the backlit heads of the audience. Merlin didn’t know what to look for, and neither do I, so I keep my eyes open for anything. Someone skulking behind the risers the audience sits on or a cameraman acting strangely. Anything that triggers a sense of unease, of not-rightness.

There’s nothing.

Everything is as it should be.

The debate rolls on—foreign policy, homeland defense, military spending—and they’re things I could answer in my sleep. Embry too, although he still hasn’t shaved the hawkish edge off his rhetoric—which, listening to him talk, I think is less about what he personally still believes and more about the practiced answers he hasn’t had time to alter since his change of heart after Abilene’s death.

I glance at my watch while Harrison Fasse answers the next question. We’re forty minutes into the debate, and there hasn’t been so much as an untoward sneeze in the room. A heady sense of relief begins to pound through me, almost dizzying in its strength.

Merlin was wrong.

Merlin was wrong.

Of course he was! Of course he was wrong, and all of this was just a delusion that I’d been weak enough to share. How silly of me to think one man could see the future, how foolish of me to believe any of this. There’s only the here and now, this one life, and I don’t even feel embarrassed that I believed it because I’m so fucking relieved.

Embry is safe.

No one has to say goodbye tonight.

Fasse is given the first chance at final remarks, and then it’s Embry’s turn, and I’m so full of relief and dizzy happiness that I’m smiling as he talks. I’ll get to hear him talk as much as I want now, I’ll get to stroke his hair while we both cradle Greer to sleep every night, election be damned. Fuck my pride. If he wins, I’ll still be in his bed every night with my queen.

Nothing, not the White House or war or death, will break the three of us. Nothing.

When it’s my turn, I feel as if all my relief and happiness and ease flow out into my words.

“I hope that I’ve been a good President for this country,” I say, taking the time to look into each face in the audience. “I believe that I have. I’ve given this country all of my energy and all of my heart—first as a soldier, and then as your leader. Mr. Moore and Mr. Fasse love this country as I do, and I’m proud to stand up here with them. I’m also proud to stand on my accomplishments. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for peace, which might sound strange for a soldier to say, but it’s the truth. When you vote next week—and when you’re using your voices to keep who you voted for accountable—I hope you speak for peace each and every time. I hope you choose giving over taking. I hope you choose sharing instead of holding on, I hope you choose hope over fear. And I hope that together we keep choosing these things, not just once, but day after day—even when it’s hard, even when we’re angry and we’re afraid. Choose each other. Believe in each other as I believe in you.”

And then I add simply, “Thank you for having me as your President. It’s been the greatest honor I can imagine.”

There’s a moment of quiet, of stunned silence. It’s too short for a closing argument, too vague, I didn’t even ask them for their votes, and I know somewhere backstage, Kay and Uri are gnashing their teeth in frustration that I went off script.

But then the applause starts, loud and rolling through the room like thunder, filling every corner, and I allow myself a single, quiet moment of pride.

Which is when it happens.

A camera-man, trying to wheel the camera around to catch the applauding crowd, realizes the dolly is trapped by some cords duct-taped to the floor and whips out a utility knife to cut the tape free and get his shot—and in a blink, the applause turns to chaos as three agents swarm him out of nowhere, grappling him to the ground and overturning the camera with an almighty crash.

I take a step forward, suddenly flooded with adrenaline, and perhaps it’s the chemical rush or perhaps it’s the lingering clarity from earlier or perhaps it’s just always how it was meant to happen, but I see a flash of movement from backstage—the side Embry’s on.

It’s the producer’s assistant.

And with all the Secret Service agents trained on the cameraman, no one sees, and Embry himself has his back turned to the assistant—like me, he was getting ready to move toward the commotion, the solider in him unwilling to hold back from jumping in.

I’m so close to him.

As I was meant to be.

It comes together in something faster and neater than an instant, every single piece of our story, every moment that the three of us have ever lived, and if this is least of what I can give, then I’ll give it gladly.

It’s not fear I feel in this final second, but love. All along it was me who had the whole world in his eyes.

There’s barely time to catch the white glint of a ceramic knife before I’ve taken the two steps necessary to shove my way between the attacker and Embry, and the arcing blade is aimed right for Embry’s ribs.

I’m there, I’m there just in time, and I manage to knock the blade aside with an elbow and the side of my arm. There’s a bright slash of pain along my triceps, a shove to my shoulder that staggers me back, and then we’re wrestling for control of the knife.

All of this happens in a split second, and I feel Embry turning in shock behind me, I can sense the rush of Secret Service agents towards us, and I land a knee in the attacker’s groin right as he kicks at my foot, and our tangled legs send us both falling to the floor, me on top of him.

I land with my forearm on his throat and my hand groping for the wrist of his knife hand, grunting as his knee or elbow or something digs into my stomach.

“It’s over,” I say.

“Strength in the Mountains,” he wheezes underneath me in Ukrainian. “Strength until Death.”

The Carpathian motto.

“There’s strength here too,” I tell him. “You’re done.”

I finally find his knife hand as Embry drops to my side to help me wrestle the would-be assassin and the Secret Service agents surround us, shouting and grabbing for the attacker. And as I’m gently pulled back to my knees and the attacker is pinned down, there’s one thing I’m very, very aware of.

The attacker no longer has the knife in his hand.

I look down.

“Ash,” Embry says, his face going pale. His eyes are on my stomach, and it’s not the pain I register first, but the hot spill of my own blood.

Somewhere someone screams.

And then I’m so dizzy I can’t breathe, can’t think properly, and I feel myself slumping—against Embry, it’s my little prince’s chest I’m against, and it’s so solid and so warm, and all those years I spent holding him, I should have made him hold me too, because it’s so nice, so very nice. He’s so strong. So good.

“The ambulance outside is ready, the paramedics are coming now,” someone says nearby. Belvedere.

Then a cloud of soft gold. “You stay here,” Greer says fiercely, her hands tight around mine, her lips near my ear. “You can’t leave me, you can’t leave us, Ash, please—”

She’s crying, and Embry’s chest is heaving behind me, and his hands are everywhere, trying to staunch the blood and cradle my face, and when I force my eyes open, I see the two of them. And I see Morgan, her face pale with horror and her hands pressed to her mouth, and Vivienne Moore barking orders at anyone who will listen, and for a minute the three women—Greer and Morgan and Vivienne—are different, dressed in gowns and crowns, and there’s a fourth woman, a woman I’ve never seen before, but I know her name.

Imogen.

My birth mother.

Behind her, the lake beckons, still and clear as glass. The four of them will go with me, but I know only my mother will take me to whatever waits after the lake.

And then I blink again and I’m back in this life, back among Greer’s desperate pleas and Embry’s broken sobs and so many hands are lifting me—a backboard or a gurney maybe—and there are so many screams and so much shouting, and at the last, before my vision dims completely, I murmur hazily up to Greer and Embry, “You have to kiss me goodbye before you go.”

And then there are frantic kisses and tears, and hands warm with my own blood.

There’s a boat waiting for me.

There’s a better place, over the water.