"America, what is this?"

I glanced back at my husband as he closed the door to my suite. He held the note I had passed him out in front of his face.

"Didn't you read it?" I asked, cocking my head to the side. "I would have thought you had by how quickly you ended the advisory council meeting."

He rolled his eyes. "Of course I read it!" he snapped. "But what does it mean?"

"I'm sorry, Your Majesty," I said in as sweet a tone as I could muster. "I didn't realize you couldn't read!" I reached for the paper in his hands. "Shall I read it to you?"

His eyes darkened. "America," he growled.

I grimaced. I had meant that last comment to come off as a joke, but it was clearly not nearly as funny as I had intended it to be. I suspected that I could thank Maxon's father for that in this particular moment. "I'm sorry, Maxon, I tried to lighten the mood. It didn't work."

He was silent for a moment, fuming, before he uncrumpled the paper in his hands. "Lift gun restrictions," he read aloud. He looked up at me as he repeated. "Lift gun restrictions."

I held my head high. "It's one solution," I said, my voice quiet but firm.

"A solution?" he queried. "Do you or do you not remember that you were once shot with a gun? That I, that my parents—my mother—we were all shot with guns?"

"You're forgetting Natalie's sister," I added plainly, seeing through his attempts to manipulate me into changing my mind. "And Celeste. And Anne. And Aspen. And Avery. Shall I go on?"

"No," he sneered, clenching his teeth and balling his fists at his sides.

"And do you remember how August Illéa told us how difficult it was for his people to arm themselves?" I asked, crossing my arms as I faced down my husband. "Do you remember what we did about it?"

"What you did," he said, pointing his gaze in my direction.

"What I did," I conceded.

He swallowed as if he was trying to convince himself to take a moment to try and calm himself. It wasn't helping. "You became an international arms dealer."

I rolled my eyes. That statement made it so much more dramatic than it had ever actually been. "I armed the people who were doing a better job of defending us than we ever could."

Maxon poured himself a glass of water. Good. He was looking for ways to ground himself. This was a good sign. He took a sip and pointed his finger at me over the rim. "You committed treason."

"I had your blessing." I returned calmly. "And may I remind you that neither of us would be here having this discussion if I hadn't."

I raised an eyebrow as I watched my husband stalk around my suite. It was a side of his anger which reared its ugly head once in a while, and I refused to be intimidated by it.

"Maxon, I'm not going to change my opinion on this simply because you want me to," I said, crossing my arms over my chest as if to signal my own stubborn streak. "I'm not necessarily saying that it will fix the problem, but it is something worth at least discussing."

"I am the king whose watchword has been peace!" he snapped.

"Says the man throwing the temper tantrum in my bedroom," I responded, coolly.

I could see from the fire in his eyes that I had gotten dangerously close to crossing the line. He threw the glass to the side of the room. It hit the wall and shattered as he walked over to me. "Are you calling me a child?" he breathed.

My heart thundered in my chest, recalling another night when I had implied that he was acting childish. I thought that after fifteen years of marriage, I would have somehow managed to control my tongue.

"Maxon," I whispered, putting my hand on his chest. "You may be the king, but you can't change my opinion. And the man I love wouldn't ask me to."

"I am never just the man you love," he growled fiercely. "It may be invisible, but I might as well have a crown affixed to my head every moment of every day."

"Who do you think you're talking to, Maxon Schreave?" I demanded, putting my hands on my hips. "You may have been born with a crown on your head, but I'm the one who puts those same invisible, all-consuming crowns on the heads of our children the moment they enter this world!"

There was something bothering Maxon. I could feel it. Something beyond this discussion of gun control. I suspected that it had something to do with the fact that the castes had been eliminated and yet nothing had changed. The people were nearly as restless as they had been the moment he had ascended the throne.

But I also knew that in this moment, the most important thing to his sanity was my ability to match his stubbornness with my own and to remind him of just who I was.

He may be the King of Illéa, but I was the Queen he chose. He had put a crown on my head, and I was not about to let him forget it.

He opened his mouth to speak before he closed it and rubbed his face with his hand. He sank onto the bed, and I could see that the anger was ebbing away and leaving an ugly tangled mess of shame in its wake.

"Maxon," I breathed as I sat beside him on the bed. I reached for his hand, pleased that he didn't try to pull it away like he had in the past.

"I—" His voice hitched as he began, and he took a breath. Then, he started again. "America, I'm sorry. I should never have said those things. I crossed the line."

Every time he came out of one of these bouts of anger, he looked like he had aged almost ten years, his face drawn with lines which would one day become wrinkled testaments to his patent gentleness.

"You were right," I whispered, though I was somewhat loathe to admit it. "There's never a time when you're just my husband." I looked at our coupled hands and sighed before I looked back up at him. "But there's also never a time when you're just my sovereign."

He nodded slowly, his gaze dropping to our hands like mine had only moments before.

His calm told me that he might be ready to actually talk about why he had stormed into my suite in such a huff. "What's wrong?"

He swallowed as he shook his head. "Not now, America."

I raised my eyebrow. "Maxon."

He turned pleading eyes to me. "I'm not saying I won't tell you, I'm just saying that maybe, for the next ten minutes, I can choose not to think about it?"

He was only thirty five, but in that moment he looked at least fifty, his reign aging him prematurely before my very eyes. And it frightened me.

I let go of his hand and ran my fingers through his hair, one of his favorite caresses which usually helped him to calm down almost the moment my fingers began lacing themselves through his hair.

He sighed and closed his eyes, and almost before my eyes, some of the lines which had been so deeply ingrained in his face just a moment before seemed to vanish. "This," he breathed. "This is why I chose you."

A mischievous smile quirked onto my lips. "Because I give such wonderful head massages?"

He didn't open his eyes, but I could see a smile quirk his lips and mirror my own smirk the way married couple's expressions often did after years of marriage. It warmed my heart that I could see our fifteen years of marriage written even in the way our nerves twitched in harmony. "You're so good at them," he chuckled.

I laughed as I leaned my head against his shoulder, feeling his arm come up to pull me closer.

I looked up into his eyes, and he seemed to ask me, beg me for something. I had seen that look in his eyes in a thousand different ways and for a thousand different reasons in the last fifteen years. And I had yet to be able to say no to him.

Our lips brushed together with all the tenderness and vulnerability of an apology, and it seemed that for now, that was enough for Maxon because he rested his forehead against mine instead of pressing for a more intense kiss like he usually did.

"I chose you because you stand up for yourself," he murmured, his eyes downcast. "I know it drove me crazy that you didn't seem to care one iota about protocol, and you didn't seem to know what my father could do to you at any turn, but in the end, I think that was one of the reasons I chose you." He swallowed as if he was divulging a dark secret. "One of the reasons I was so attracted to you in the first place."

It wasn't a moment to be flippant, and so I was quiet as he raised his eyes back to meet mine.

"I think about that first elimination sometimes," he admitted, his fingers reaching instinctively for mine. "And I wondered why it was so easy to eliminate some of these girls after a five minute meeting. Was it really fair to them to base the rest of our lives off of something as subjective as electricity?"

I thought back to Ashley who had been so timid and yet so perfectly happy to be in the Selection while I was still dreading the thought of leaving Aspen.

Maxon and I had chemistry even back then. And even after all these years of a beautiful and strong marriage, it still stung to consider what might have happened.

But he had a valid question. Was it really fair to all the girls to have an 8-party elimination before breakfast on their first full day in the palace?

I didn't have an answer, and so I decided to stay quiet instead of trying to fill the space with something I wasn't even sure I believed. Fifteen years of being Queen had taught me to speak with restraint whenever I was unsure, and while I wasn't perfect at living by that rule in my personal life, I was grateful for what progress I had made and for how that progress had affected my marriage.

"Did you know that my father put his girls through a test during his Selection?"

I had been focusing my attention on drawing lazy circles on the back of Maxon's hand with mine, and my head snapped up in surprise at the thought. "What?"

He nodded, not surprised in the slightest by my shock. "He even once suggested I try it to see if there was a suitable wife among you."

Maxon's sarcasm dripped off the word "suitable" like poison and fell into me almost like ice in my veins.

"What did he make them do?"

The question was out before I had a chance to wonder if I really wanted to know the answer. Even now, fifteen years after his death, I wanted to shudder at the mere thought of Clarkson Schreave.

"He asked them to cut their hair," he said softly. "He told every single one of the girls that they would look better with shorter hair."

He sighed as he pulled me close again, breathing in the scent of my hair as if he was giving thanks for never having listened to his father's advice.

"My mother's ladies-in-waiting used to talk about my mother's hair during the Selection," he said as he ran his fingers through my flowing red hair. "Dark. Long." He played with the curled ends of a strand of hair as if the action helped him think through the words he wanted to say. "Almost to her knees."

My eyes widened. I hadn't known Maxon's mother for nearly as long as he had, but I had never seen even a picture of Amberly with anything but shoulder-length hair.

Maxon let my hair fall out of his grasp before he made a fist, clenching his teeth in anger. "My father asked her to cut her hair, and she went right to her room and made the change."

"Maxon," I breathed, putting a hand on his fist. I wasn't sure if I was trying to calm him or if I was trying to ascertain just who he was angry with. Was he angry with his father? His mother? Both?

"He didn't care what they looked like with short hair," he spat. "He just wanted to know who the most compliant woman was."

I put a hand on Maxon's chest, and I could feel his heart hammering with the violence of his feelings toward his father. As often as I told Maxon that his father's tyranny over him could be wielded for good, forged into an example which he could take with him always, I always had this tiny wish that I could have erased all of the effect Clarkson had had on his son.

"Apparently, he chose my mother because she was the only one to give him more than an inch," he said, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat with the tenderness of his emotion.

"Oh, Maxon."

Tears moistened his eyes. "He had a few more tests for the women, but I think that one is the one that angers me most." He swallowed, his eyes growing hard. "He didn't care about destroying something beautiful or changing the woman he was supposed to love. He just worried about how her personality would fit in with his need for control."

He turned his eyes toward me, and I could see the determined realization which had set in them. "With the exception of Elise and Natalie," he admitted with a shrug. "The final five? You were all women who would stand up to me."

I blinked as if this was the first time it had ever occurred to me.

Celeste had only come to care about what any of us thought after she had self-determined that her actions in the palace to that point had been undignified and beneath her. Stand up for herself, even to Maxon? He'd once told me when I'd expected to be eliminated that she had told him that she would make him cry if he hurt me.

Check.

Kriss would have given him the world at the moment he asked for it, but she was not without her own fire. I still hadn't told Maxon that I had discovered she was one of the Northern rebels, put into the competition to try and gain a competitive edge over Maxon's decisions. Frankly, at this point in our marriage, it wasn't a good idea for either of us to bring up Kriss, and I wasn't about to make the same mistake I'd made over and over again in our courtship. So, I had held to Kriss's secret if only to make sure Maxon knew without a doubt that he could trust me, that he had no need to worry about how much I trusted him.

Still, knowing that Kriss was a northern rebel told me that while she had fallen in love with him, that didn't mean she was going to just roll over for him whenever he asked.

Check.

And then there was me. The woman who had yelled at him on our first night in the palace, at a date we shouldn't have had, in the gardens where I shouldn't have been, that I wasn't his dear.

Check.

"I—I never thought about it that way," I said, surprised. "No wonder your father hated the lot of us."

Maxon laughed, and I could appreciate the sound though my statement hadn't intended to be humorous. I felt certain with each sound of his laughter that we had taken far too much time in the last few minutes with serious topics. A little levity, yes, even at his father's and the Elite's expenses, was overdue.

"And of the three of them," he said looking me in the face. "You were the only one who would openly defy my father." A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. "I don't think I realized how much of a rebel I really was until I noticed how attracted I was to you when you were defying his orders."

I stared at my husband in shock. "Are you saying you're only married to me because I played into your personal fantasy of breaking your father's rules time and time again?"

A teasing smile played on his lips almost like the boy I'd first fallen in love with all those years ago. "I'm not saying it's the only reason." His nod was almost like an admission that there was more to our story than that. And then, the twinkle in his eye came back, gleaming in the light of the lamps in the room. "But I'm not saying it didn't help your chances."

"Maxon Schreave!" I cried, playfully throwing one of the throw pillows from the bed toward him.

He laughed as he easily dodged the projectile. For a moment, it seemed as if we were back in our twenties, newlyweds so blissfully in love that it seemed nothing could threaten our future.

He pulled me onto the bed the way he had so many times before, and as my hair spilled out on his chest, he curled his arms around my middle. I felt so safe and happy in that moment that I had almost forgotten what we were talking about.

"I think I sent those eight women home because I could almost see them with cropped hair before I'd even heard their names," he whispered in my ear as our laughter died down. "And I couldn't—I couldn't find happiness with someone who wouldn't tell me when I had crossed a line." He sighed. "I'm too much like my father to be able to trust my own judgment sometimes."

I turned in his embrace so that we were now lying facing one another, each on our side on the bed.

"Hey." I never used my commanding tone with my husband, only with my children and with my subjects when absolutely necessary, but if there was one thing I wanted him to understand, it was this. "You are nothing like your father."

He scoffed. "You heard me, America," he said as he waved to where he had come in raging earlier. "I was trying to get you to agree with me by intimidating you. That was him, Clarkson Schreave, back from the grave and using my mouth to deliver his blows."

"Maxon," I said as I pursed my lips together in disapproval. "This job is stressful, and unfortunately for you, the only person you ever saw in it was your father. So, of course you're going to come in here once in a while in a bad temper, and you're going to cross a line because that's the only role model you ever had for it!"

His brow furrowed as if he wasn't sure if I was trying to comfort or criticize him, and something told me I'd probably struck him right between the two.

"But guess what?" I said with a shake of my head and a slight chuckle. "That doesn't scare me. It never did."

Maxon opened his mouth to speak, but I continued on as if I hadn't seen his mouth move.

"We are always going to have things to disagree about," I admitted. "And there are times when I'll yell at you even when you don't deserve it, and there are times when you'll yell at me even when I don't deserve it."

Maxon grimaced but nodded in agreement. I knew he was thinking through all the times I'd yelled at him, from our first meeting when he'd tried to call me "my dear" for the first time, to the time I'd railed at him for letting Marlee get caned just because she'd fallen in love with another man during the Selection.

He'd been blameless in both instances, often having acted with such tender generosity toward me and toward Marlee and Carter that the instant I had a chance to calm my head or gathered all the facts, I was aching for his forgiveness and to be back in his good graces.

"And the way I figure it, I can unequivocally say that I'm the one who started yelling at you first," I teased.

He hung his head, not in shame, but as if he didn't want me to see his laugh. "That's true," he admitted with a chuckle.

I wrapped my arms around his neck, and he put his arms almost naturally around my waist, pulling me closer to him. "Maxon, you keep worrying that you're like your father, but the truth is that you're nothing like him really."

There was such naked doubt back in his eye that I nearly stopped. Except that I couldn't. If I did, he'd keep that doubt alive and well in his heart, and I would have been the one who resurrected it.

"Maxon, I want you think about this," I began slowly, reliving events in my past which still awoke me at night with screams into my pillow. "On the night that your mother dove in front of your father to take a bullet for him—"

My heart pounded in my chest as the scene flashed before my eyes again. The feeling that something was off. The gun. Celeste.

"America," he whispered, his grip on my waist tightening as if he wanted to try and anchor me back to this world fifteen years removed from that fateful day.

I blinked back tears as I looked into his face, stricken not only with the memory but with the pain he could read on my own face. "If you were anything like the ruthless, calculating, deliberately cruel man your father was," I continued, my voice sounding small and hollow in the face of the memories. "You, the Crown Prince of Illéa, whose kingdom was under attack, who had no idea whether the King or Queen were safe, and who had just announced to me that you were not, in fact, going to choose me to be your princess and that I should just accept the consequences as graciously as possible before I left to go home—"

Even the pain of that rejection was still as fresh in flashback as it had been back then, no matter how many times I reminded myself that we had been married for fifteen glorious and beautiful years together.

"America, you don't have to—"

I continued as if I hadn't heard him. "You didn't just step to the side, you didn't just cry out and distract the gunman, you didn't just stand in the wrong place at the wrong time." I swallowed down tears at the memory of coming upon his body, crumpled beside me on the floor as a red stain grew on his chest. "You jumped in front of me to take my bullet. The Schreave line your father so fiercely protected nearly died out because you were so much more like your mother than your father."

I was shaking, and Maxon pulled me closer to him to try and steady me.

"And all this after you'd seen me in a compromising position with a guard outside my room," I whispered as the tears I'd kept at bay finally fell down my cheeks. "When I'd hid the truth of my previous relationship with Aspen from you."

I didn't realize I hadn't really looked at him for the whole of that speech, but when I looked into his eyes and realized I hadn't seen the tenderness in his eyes so deep perhaps in any moments but the births of our four children, my heart melted.

"And still, in what could have been your dying breath," I managed, refusing to drop into sobs against his chest before I could finish my story. "You made Aspen save me first after you told me to break your heart a thousand times because it was only ever mine to break."

"You are nothing like your father." My voice, hoarse with emotion, squeaked with the tears in my throat, but Maxon was staring at me as if he could feel the intended weight of every word I said. "Nothing. And you never were."

I held his gaze for a moment before Maxon gently reached up and cupped my cheek in his hand. I knew he was coming in for a kiss, and I so desperately wanted that kiss, but the sweetness of the gesture did more than just bring our lips together. They released the tears I had been trying to speak around.

The first kiss, a brush against my lips with his, was flavored by my tears as Maxon pulled me into his strong embrace, to my safe place. Then, he kissed my cheeks, the corners of my eyes, my forehead, my mouth, each with increasing need.

"Thank you."

His voice was ragged as if his broken self had just found a piece of what he had been missing in that moment.

I clung to him like he was my lifeline because simply speaking, he was very nearly the only thing which had tethered me to the earth after my father's death, after the terror I had witnessed in the palace that day. "I love you, Maxon Schreave. Always and forever, I love you."

"And I love you, America Singer," he breathed against my lips as he brought his fingers up to the back of my head to cradle it softly in his gently hands. "How on earth could I ever have been foolish enough to wonder if I could trust you with my heart?"

Though the kisses were still gentle, they were coming at dizzying speeds. Was I kissing him, was he kissing me? I almost couldn't tell anymore. "And how could I have ever wondered at your devotion?"

I could feel Maxon's smile against my lips. "We're quite a pair, Your Majesty."

"Quite a pair." I agreed.