Because I Love You✔️

Chapter 115: Premature Blessing

This is dedicated to @sparrowed for being an awesome waffle and following me since the beginning! Stay awesome, Mia!

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Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen: Premature Blessing

The bomb had been dropped.

Have you ever seen a cat notice a mouse and go utterly, utterly still, like even the rise-and-fall motion of its breathing might send the mouse running for the hills? Gus did that, as unbending and cold as a statue despite the sudden inferno swirling in his eyes.  

Xaphile pressed his lips together and tried not to squirm under the man's gaze, unseeing and unbreakable, but then his composure did break and his lips moved.

"You what?" he slowly demanded. "What did you just say?"

Xaphile sighed. Gus stared at him with enormous jade green eyes and a bone white face.

"You what?" he repeated, not blinking even once. "What did you just say?"

Xaphile's stomach tightened and he finally lowered his gaze to make eye-contact.

"I said," he softly murmured, "I think I'm beginning to fall in love with Ellameira Rochard."

Gus put a hand to his forehead and clenched his jaw.

"That cannot be," he growled. "Your behavior towards her... you cannot be honest."

"I'm being more honest with you right now than I've been in weeks," Xaphile countered, then turned away and looked at the trees with a tight mouth. "I'm not ready to face these feelings, or even Ella's feelings... that much is true, but I do know what falling in love feels like."

Gus pinned him with an unamused expression. "How long have you felt this way?" 

Xaphile opened his mouth to reply. He realized that he didn't know the answer. He closed his mouth again.

"A few weeks," he said at last. "I don't know how to explain it. It just happened somehow."

"Your relationship cannot be consecrated," Gus hissed. "It is illegal for interracial relationships to take place! That includes you and Ella, Xaphile, regardless of your position! If you go through with this and remain close to her, you will be putting her at risk! She could lose everything!"

"I wouldn't let that happen," he sharply shot back. "Everyone has said countless times that I'm apparently some sort of royal with more political power than the king. Doesn't that mean, technically, that Ella is safer with me than she would have been otherwise?"

Gus stepped forward and placed frantic hands on his shoulder.   

"You're forgetting that there are other crimes at play here, too," he protested. "Vrael Daael, for example! If it is discovered that he is a halfling, all of us will be implicated in a very nasty situation! Ella is already being put in harm's way just by being near him!"

Xaphile hit his limit in that moment.

He was sick of everyone bringing up Vrael's heritage, as if him existing were actually a crime. His irritation rose and he growled, but the stillness did not shatter since he kept the noise inside his chest, where it rumbled up against his throat like a miniature earthquake.  

Gus instantly jerked away from him with an alarmed expression.

"He's not a criminal, nor are his parents," he said, speaking very carefully. "I understand why you're so worried, but we do have ways to get around the laws your king put in place."