Free Fallen in Love by Lauren Kate Page A

words were the hardest ones: Yes, Roland had already known the answer he sought. He’d just hoped that someone would tell him otherwise and save him from having to do what had to be done.
    When he came back to tell her, Rosaline seemed already to know. He climbed to her balcony, but she didnot rush to kiss him. Her face stiffened in suspicion as soon as he came into her chambers.
    “I sense a change in you.” Her voice was cold with fear. “What is it?”
    Roland’s body ached when he saw her look so sad. He did not want to lie to her, but he could not find the words.
    “Oh, Rosaline, there is so much I could tell you—”
    Then, as if Rosaline remembered his loquacious poems, she demanded: “Answer me in one word. What does our future hold?”
    That had been more than a thousand years ago. And still, Roland cringed now, thinking back on what he’d told her. He wished he could smash this memory and the moment with it. But it had happened. And you couldn’t change the past.
    He had given Rosaline her one word:
    “Farewell.”
    He’d wanted to say, “Forever.”
    But Cam had spoken truly: Forever wasn’t possible between a woman and a fallen angel.
    He’d fled before she could beg him not to go. He thought he was being valiant. But life had taught him that he wasn’t. He was devastated and scared.
    After that, Roland had only seen her once more: two weeks later, when he’d hovered out of sight of her castle window and watched his love weep for one full hour.
    After that, he vowed never to cause anyone pain in love. He disappeared.
    It became his way.
    Roland brushed something from his cheek and was stunned to find it was a tear. Though he’d wiped a million briny drops from other cheeks, he could not recall a time when he himself had cried.
    He thought of Lucinda and Daniel, of their eternal devotion to each other. They did not walk away from their mistakes—and over the centuries, they had made many of them. They returned to those mistakes, revisited them, worked through them, until something had at last clicked in this final life, when she was reincarnated as Lucinda Price. It was what had driven her to flee into her past—to find the solution to the curse. So that she and Daniel could be together.
    They would always be together. Always have each other, no matter what.
    Roland had no one.
    Silently, he rose to his feet and made his own Valentine’s pledge. He would scale the wall to Rosaline again—and redeem himself the only way he knew how.

FOUR

LOVE’S PUPIL
    B ack up the outer wall, a second slink along the stone parapet, and then the final sheer ascent to the turret and its balcony and Rosaline once more.
    By the time Roland again reached the balcony, the sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows over his shoulder. Announcers shifted and coiled within the shadows, a way of whispering
We are here
, but they left Roland alone. The temperature had dropped, and now the air carried hints of smoke and a coming frost.
    He imagined entering the turret via the balcony, stealing through the twilight-dark halls until he found her in her room. And then he pictured her expression:
    Images of her staggering backward in amazement, joy plain on her face, hands clenched to her exquisite breast …
    But what if she was angry?
    Still angry, five years later. It was possible.
    He shouldn’t rule it out.
    They’d shared something rare and beautiful, and he’d learned that women felt deeply when it came to love. They felt love in ways Roland could never understand, as if their hearts had extra chambers, vast infinites where love could stay and never leave.
    What was he doing here? The wind wove its way beneath his steel armor. He shouldn’t be here. This part of his life was over. Cam might have been wrong about love, but he wasn’t wrong about how time had changed Roland.
    He should climb back down, get on his horse, and find Daniel.
    Only … he couldn’t.
    What
could
he do?
    He could grovel.
    He could