Anger and pity crashed together in Johan’s chest, and disgust—with her father and with himself for understanding exactly how and why the man had done such things. It was simple manipulation really, but taken to an extreme and abusive level. It was what he feared he was capable of, made manifest.

“Nya.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t really understand how bad it was until I met Naledi. It seemed normal, and no one else told me that it wasn’t.” She inhaled deeply, her gaze still darting around and landing on things that caught her interest as they walked. “People think my father poisoned her because he wanted to hurt Thabiso politically, or he wanted me to be Thabiso’s bride, but I think he saw something dangerous in the way she’d befriended me. It scared him. But people think he would never hurt me. They know he did terrible things to everyone else, but they still think the way he treated me was love. Oh! Look at this view!”

Johan didn’t need to look at the view. He had seen it for years, at every time of day, in every season. At this time of year, the late afternoon sky would be darkening to a frosty midnight blue, with streaks of orange and pink huddled at the horizon like a comfortable blanket before being turned down to reveal the starry pattern beneath.

He looked at Nya instead. At her bright eyes and wide smile, and the joy that should have been crushed in her so long ago. It wasn’t just that Nya wasn’t soft—she was strong. Stronger than Johan had imagined. Resilient. She didn’t flinch away from her pain, and she didn’t even wait to receive the proper amount of pity before she was moving on to pure bliss at something so simple as a sunset.

Sunsets happened every day. Nya Jeramis did not.

His chest hurt from the beauty of her smile, the sudden upward curve of her mouth sharply cutting away the revelation of her painful past.

“How do you do this?” he asked.

“What?” she asked, brows raised.

“How do you not let your pain take away your joy?”

Her brow scrunched and her mouth pursed as she thought of a reply. “Well, what would be the use of that? I’m angry at my father. I’m not sure I ever want to see him again. But he kept me caged for most of my life, in a way. If I spent all my time being angry, I would just be in a new cage of my own making. That would be silly, no?”

Johan stepped forward and pulled her into his arms. It wasn’t desire he felt for her in that moment—it was admiration. It was . . . devotion. It was the resounding crack as every one of the rules he’d constructed to keep people away broke beneath the weight of his feelings.

Basically, it was his downfall.

This was temporary, however deeply the emotion coursed in him. It would end, and Johan didn’t handle endings very well. He avoided them at all costs. He was already dealing with Lukas, the person he loved most in the world, pushing him away—he wouldn’t be able to take another loss.

Still, he held her close, as the wintry air whipped around them and the last traces of sunlight faded away. Other people walked by, tourists and locals enjoying the view; he was supposed to be out shaking hands and smiling and hoping people would vote to keep his brat of a brother in the castle, but he kept his gaze fixed out over the railing at the cliff’s edge.

“Why is the city on two levels?” she asked, turning her head and resting her cheek on his chest as she looked out over the late afternoon lights of the rows of houses below, broken up with patches of darker forest green. She didn’t move away from him; in fact, she settled in quite comfortably.

Johan had held a lover before, but not like this. Or maybe he had, and they just hadn’t fit so perfectly against him.

“We are a kingdom built on a natural fortress,” he said. “Invaders would come from all over, they could swarm and lay ruin to the towns below, but here, the heart of the city and the country is . . .” He forgot the word in English, so he shrugged and pulled her closer. “They couldn’t get up the sheer rock walls. It is how we survived changing boundaries and war, and then more war.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Beautiful but insurmountable.”

“Ah, that’s the word. Insurmountable.” He sighed and rubbed his hand over her back.

“It’s nice, being here with you like this,” she said. “I like the kissing, but I like this, too.”

It was so easy to forget that this was new to her. She was not naive, but she was inexperienced.

He should never have slipped that ring on her finger. He would have to take it back from her soon, send her on her way. Some other man would put a ring on her finger, not as an impulsive gesture but after having thought long and hard about wanting to spend his life with her. Nya would accept, and move on, and Johan would still be alone in his fortress city.

He really hated living in a fairy-tale metaphor sometimes.

“Is it called spooning if we hug while we’re standing?” she asked suddenly, her voice playful again. “Or forking?”

She started to chuckle and then gasped as her gaze jumped up to meet his. “No, I didn’t mean, that is—”

He leaned closer, cleared his suddenly dry throat. “Sporking. It’s called sporking.”

She grinned. He didn’t know why, since what he’d said made no sense really, but he was grinning, too, now.

“Isn’t that your brother?” someone said in Liechtienbourgish, and Johan shifted his head just enough to catch a flash of bright pink. Lukas, walking toward them with a teenage boy that Johan didn’t know. The boy’s hair was brown and his clothing trendy, unlike the aristocratic boys Lukas usually hung out with. Johan knew all of Lukas’s friends, and this one, who coincided with his brother’s descent into rebellion, was not one of them.