The First Loss: Vaelor x Elora (Rogue X Ara Book 3)

Chapter 22

Drak essentially kicked me out of Rainsmyre after two weeks.

I’d helped out where I could, and we rescued two more Fae—a set of twins, a boy and a girl. We also managed to get eyes on Adrastus’ boy, Rogue. He looked to be eleven or twelve, but he carried a sadness in him no child should understand. Not all that different to what I saw in Adon when I found him all those years ago, but rescuing this child would start a civil war with a deranged Draig.

And his poor mother…

It’d been a little over thirteen years since his attacks ceased. We were moments from ending him for the good of the realm, days, even. The plan had been laid to catch him off-guard and end his violence once and for all, but then Adrastus disappeared.

For two years.

We knew when he’d vanished without a trace, we were too late. We’d missed our opportunity, and worse, he’d found his mate—found and kidnapped. We still tried to find him simply to rescue her, but it took us far too long. By the time we found where he’d settled, she was gone, and his second son had been born.

My gut twisted into guilt-ridden knots as it always did when I thought of them. If we had killed Adrastus, that poor woman wouldn’t have had to survive him—an impossible task, it seemed. She wouldn’t have died, and that boy… He was forced to live with his monster of a father. It wasn’t fair to either of them, and it still plagued me, but not as much as it did Drakyth.

It was only a matter of time before the boy outgrew his father, though, then he would be free, and we could swoop in to help. That was what we told ourselves, at least, the lies we tried to convince ourselves with.

In reality, we were watching a father kill his son slowly, in mind and soul before body.

Fuck.

I’d thrown myself into work after we’d returned from that short trip, doing every laborious task I could find—the most time consuming being wood splitting. Hour after hour, day after day, I cut and split, cut and split, cut and split, until Drak declared they had enough to last a year, maybe two.

After that, he shoved me away, leveled the axe at me, and told me to go home before I “ran myself into the ground with the rest of the firewood.”

The muscles along my back, shoulders, and arms were sore and tender when I begrudgingly arrived back at Draig Hearth. Ewan was in Nautia for the time being, so I headed for Iaso first. I knocked, but when she didn’t answer, I cracked the door open and peeked inside.

Empty.

I strolled to the wall of windows overlooking her greenhouse and found her kneeling in the soft soil, plucking leaves from a small bush. The door was already propped open, so I entered and descended the small staircase.

“No welcome back party?” I asked, forcing a playful tone.

She startled, her voluptuous hair swaying as she turned her head toward me. “Oh, Vaelor, I didn’t expect to see you here.”

My brows knitted. “In your greenhouse? I always come find you when I return.”

She gave me a flat look and dusted her hands off before resting them in her lap. “At Draig Hearth.”

“Why?” My steps slowed, my heart racing.

She started to laugh like the answer was obvious, but it died off when I didn’t join her. She tilted her head before rising to her feet. “Oh, you don’t know yet. All right. Elora isn’t here.”

I stumbled over my own feet, staggering a step and catching myself on a scrawny tree. “What?”

Did she go back to Auryna? Had she unintentionally just started a…problem between Auryna and Ravaryn?

Did I finally drive a wedge between us?

I swallowed hard against the rising tension in my chest, running my fingers over the thin bark I still leaned on. “Where?”

“Ara’s cottage.”

Her words could not have caught me more by surprise.

My breath caught in my throat. If she was there, Father had to have taken her. Why? Why would he do that? Why would he go there?

I couldn’t imagine what or how he was doing. Would he be lost in the past again? Did he sit and stare at the wood? At the paintings? The garden? Was he eating, sleeping?

“They’re doing okay.” Iaso picked up her wicker basket and gave me a pat on the shoulder as she strolled by me, leaving bare footprints in the soil. An absent laugh slipped past my lips—Elora would absolutely join Iaso sans shoes. “Both of them.”

I swiveled around to follow her. “Both?”

She glanced over her shoulder and nodded. “Both.”

I let loose a breath of relief before following her back into her chambers. “You’ve heard from them, then?”

“Elora sent a letter,” she replied.

My relief was short lived, replaced by an ugly feeling I wanted to claw out of my chest. She hadn’t sent me a letter. We hadn’t sent any letters in such a long time, too long, and I knew that was my fault. I ran away all those months ago, and she’d still sent me a letter, then another. I broke our tradition. I hurt her, and she didn’t owe me any more letters. She didn’t owe me words.

She owed me nothing, and yet she had still been reaching her hand out. She still hadn’t given up on me, and what did I do?

I ran. Again.

Fuck, I’m just embarrassing myself at this point. I need…

I need to let her go home.

Iaso sent Elora a short letter, alerting her and Father of my return, but even that sent a pang of jealousy through my gut and a softer wave of nostalgia through my chest.

With that, I bid farewell and promptly left, strolling down the main halls to my chambers, past the breakfast room, down the farthest hall. Once inside, I pricked my finger and slid the droplet of blood onto the carved V hidden behind the clothes in my closet. The door materialized, and I pushed it open, stepped inside my nook, and closed the door behind me.

I released a slow breath, reclining on the door with my eyes closed. She wasn’t here. She shouldn’t have ever been here in the first place, but now, she wasn’t here.

She wasn’t in my home. She wasn’t with me. I wasn’t even sure she was my friend. She’d said she wanted to be, but I’d left her like I always did. Did that still ring true?

Could we be friends again if she went home? Could we go back to the way things were?

I winced and opened my eyes, hitting the wood with a single pound of my fists.

My soul didn’t want that. My heart didn’t want that. My body for damned sure didn’t want that.

The only part of me that wanted to go back to seeing her once a year and hearing her thoughts only through written words was my mind—and even that felt like a lie.

“Damn it all,” I muttered. “What do I want?”

I didn’t have time to answer my own question before a letter materialized in my hand. My heart lurched, begging, pleading, hoping it was from Elora.

When I unfolded the paper, my breath left me in a harsh exhale, forced from my lungs. I slammed my hand on the desk, my vision blackening around the edges, tunneling on one singular word.

Sick.

Elora wanted to stay away for a few more days, because she was sick and didn’t want to spread whatever she had.

A tunnel of wind and rain touched down over the ocean, the sky nearly black. A stiff wind blew through the open window, sending the stray papers flying, and I let them.

Canvases fell over. Paints spilled. Charcoal and pencils scattered across the floor.

I could do nothing to stop it.

Sweat rolled down my spine, the walls of the room closing in, and I ripped my shirt off when the room grew too small and I started suffocating.

Suffocating.

Choking.

Coughing.

Visions of a skinny hand covering a blue-tinted mouth as she coughed, her blonde hair dried and brittle, one blue eye, one green—tired and sunken in.

Sick.

Sick.

Sick.

The word echoed in my skull relentlessly, mercilessly.

Elora is sick.

I sprinted to the window and dove from it before lightning even had a chance to strike, but I didn’t fall for more than half a second. It caught me like I knew it would, but it was panicked, crackling and sizzling and bright. My energy was everywhere, all at once, and I couldn’t narrow my location.

It took too long, far too long, but eventually, I made it to the cottage. I dropped in the back garden, but the storm didn’t stop there. Bolt after bolt struck—the ocean, the ground, the forest, an apple tree.

It burst into flames.

Fuck. Anything but the apples.

Rain fell harder, blurring even the cottage from sight as I stalked forward, but at least it soaked the trees.

Elora ripped the back door open and ran outside in nothing but her shift. She was immediately soaked as rain pelted us both, the thin white fabric revealing every part of her.

She glanced around and gasped when she spotted me. Her bare feet splashed through the puddles and mud as she sprinted over, and my steps didn’t slow either.

When she halted in front of me, breathing heavily, her expression confused but expectant, I grabbed her arm, and lightning rippled across the sky, echoed in my eyes. The silver light reflected on her pale face, her eyes wide but not afraid.

“What are you doing?” she screamed over the storm, jerking her arm away.

Her voice was hoarse.

Terror consumed me so thoroughly, I gasped for breath, my world starting to spin, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Elora, not even the bond flaring in my chest at the lack of tonic. Panic suffocated it, leaving it nearly unnoticeable.

I dragged her to the beach, so I wouldn’t accidentally burn the house down when lightning struck again and again and again. Uncontrollable.

She fought me the entire way.

“Taking you to Iaso,” I ground out through my tightening throat. My chest had never been tighter, the rain doing nothing to douse the fire ravaging my lungs.

“No.” She yanked back and slid her arm from my grip, wet and slippery.

“Yes!” I grabbed her wrist and started forward again.

She yanked and yanked, pleading to stay, but she had to come. She had to see Iaso. She had to. Iaso was the realm’s best healer, and she could heal Elora.

Elora could not die.

She screamed. She slapped. She sat on the ground, and still, I dragged her. She kicked at my hand, my legs, anything she could reach.

She can hate me, but she cannot die too.

Flashes of coughing and blood-speckled rags and rasping breaths.

She cannot die.

Fevers and coughing and vomiting.

You cannot die.

No longer did thunder reach my ears, just hacking coughs. Coughing and retching and blood-speckled rags and dry whispers of death. Her last breath. “Everyone dies.”

Not Elora.

Never Elora.

My foot hit the sand, and I stuck my hand up.

“Vaelor!” she screamed.

The world went still—the rain, wind, lightning, my body, mind, heart. Time itself slowed as she called out my name.

My name.

I lowered my hand slowly but didn’t release her as I dropped to my knees and met her gaze, rain still falling but lighter.

“You cannot die too,” I whispered, broken and strangled.

“Oh,” she breathed, shaking her head fervently. She took my cheeks in her palms. “Oh, Vaelor.”

With that, she threw her arms around my neck and squeezed. I couldn’t breathe, but that was all right. I hadn’t been able to breathe since the moment she sent that letter, and now, she was holding me. Elora held me, and I could feel her chest rising and falling in even breaths, her heart racing in her chest against my bare one.

Alive.

Elora is alive.

I wrapped my arms around her waist and buried my head in the crook of her neck, inhaling cinnamon vanilla. “I can’t lose you too.”

Her voice cracked when she whispered, “You’re not losing me. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

“You have to come back to Draig Hearth. Iaso can heal you. She can help. She can?—”

“I’m not sick.”

I stilled. “What?”

When she started to unwind her arms from around my neck, my first instinct was to hold them there. I wanted to feel her, embrace her, hold her. I wanted her to hold me.

But she wasn’t sick.

Instead of relief finding me, anger poured through my veins.

She moved her hands back to my cheeks. “I didn’t want to come back yet, and Iaso had sent me a letter saying you returned. I thought if I…” She shook her head, water dripping from her lashes. “I didn’t know hearing I was sick would scare you like this. I didn’t think?—”

Clenching my jaw, I gripped her wrists and pulled her hands from my face. “No, you didn’t think, Elora.”

She ripped her hands from mine. “I?—”

“You never think.”

I jerked to my feet, and she remained kneeling in the sand, her feet neatly tucked beneath her ass. She was so fucking perfect and it only enraged me further. I wanted to slip my thumb past those full, red lips and feel her warmth. I wanted to bend her over my knee until she was a sobbing, wanton mess, slick for my cock while spewing apologies.

But I did neither. “You only feel, and you subject everyone around you to exactly how you feel too.”

Her chin trembled for a moment, her throat bobbing before her expression hardened. She slapped the sand before rising to her feet, her entire body on display beneath the soaked white linen.

My gaze fell to the two rose-colored buds revealed by her dress, and every thought in my head came to a screeching halt. I’d never seen her nipples before. I wanted them in my mouth, in my hands, pinched, licked, sucked?—

She stepped closer and pointed a finger at me.

“You know what? Sure. Fine. You’re right. I do wear every emotion clear as day on my face, but at least I’m not a coward like you.” She jabbed her finger in the center of my chest over my heart, and my fists clenched at my sides, rage renewed. “I’d rather wear my damned heart on my sleeve than lock it in a cage like yours. You think you’re protecting it, being cautious or logical or whatever excuse you tell yourself at the end of the day, but you’re not. You’re subjecting yourself to permanent heartbreak, permanent loneliness, and it’s sad.”

She shook her head and took a step back, then another, but on instinct, my hand jerked out and grabbed her waist. A muscle feathered in her jaw, her chin held high, as I pulled her closer inch by inch.

“Better to be alone than in pain, than to lose someone,” I seethed, wanting to grip her tighter, to slide my hands over every soaked inch of her, soft and malleable beneath my touch.

“Is it?” she whispered. “No…No, I don’t believe that. I don’t even think you believe that. I think you know exactly how miserable it is. I think your soul begs for more, and your mind can’t stand it—or just can’t accept it.”

She gently wrapped her fingers around my wrist and pulled my hand away from her side before stepping away again to distance herself.

My heart thundered, torn between anger, lust, regret, and resignation, between leaving and grabbing her again, between screaming profanities and whispering filthy words that made her cheeks flush.

She tilted her head, her brows furrowing. “I believe its best to have, at the very least, felt love and perhaps lose it, too, than to live the life you’re choosing.” She took another wide step back, and my feet remained planted where they were. “Perhaps this is me losing it now.” My throat constricted, my eyes following her feet, counting every step. She’s leaving. “Perhaps I’m alone in that, in this feeling, but I’m grateful for it regardless, because at least I know I’ve lived. I’m not chained by fear. I don’t let myself be chained.” Another step. Another. Another. She was too far, her heel touching the yard once again. “I feel sorry for you, Vaelor. I’m sorry that the closest thing you’ll ever feel to love is what you put into your kingdom. My only regret is that it cannot love you back. Not in the way I can…could. Not in the way I could have.”

My eyes snapped to hers.

She loves me. She’s in love with me.

She’d said those words before, but I’d been too blinded to truly hear them, to feel the power in them, and now, she said them in past tense.

She could have loved me.

Could have.

She loved me, and I hurt her.

She loved me, and I left her.

She loved me, and she was walking away, her back to me as she inched closer and closer to that back door. But she wasn’t running, not in the way I did. She was leaving, which felt much worse. She was giving up.

Why did that damned door feel like more? Like if I let her walk inside and close it behind her that she’d close the door on me, too?

She should. She should leave me out here and slam the door behind her, slam it so hard the glass rattled and frames fell off the wall, because she deserved better. She deserved someone who had never hurt her or taken her for granted, who knew what they wanted outright and didn’t fight demons she couldn’t see. Hell, I couldn’t even see them, but I sure felt them, clawing at the confines of my chest constantly.

Let her go.

She reached the path.

Let her go.

She stepped onto the patio.

Let. Her. Go.

She was within steps of leaving me, leaving us behind.

“No,” I whispered. Blood pounding in my ears drowned out the rain, tingling in my veins, panic winding through my chest. “No, no, no.”

Before I had a second to consider the repercussions, I sprinted after her. She swiveled on her heel, gasping when I neared her, but I didn’t stop. We collided, my hands finding her cheeks as my lips crashed to hers without restraint—with passion, with release, with love.

I didn’t hold back. I didn’t hide. I didn’t repress. I kissed her like she was the moon and I was the sea, like we’d been watching and longing for each other for eons, only to now discover we were within reach. I devoured her like she was the light I was tethered to, the force that pulled me, moved me, because damn it all, she was.

She slowly melted, her hands finding my chest, a moan slipping past her lips and into mine. I groaned and deepened everything. One hand slid to her jaw while the other moved to her lower back, pressing her to me so not a single part of her body wasn’t touching mine. My tongue slid along the seam of her lips, and she gasped, her mouth parting, and I slipped in.

I wanted all of her.

I was tired of fighting. I was tired of being afraid.

I wanted to be brave. With her. Because of her. Like her.

I broke the kiss, and her eyes fluttered open to meet mine, her chest heaving. Her body molded to me, and I never wanted her anywhere else. This was where she belonged—in my arms. Today. Tonight. Tomorrow. Forever, in every life, every time, every realm.

“Free me,” I whispered as I ran a thumb along her bottom lip. “Free me of this cage, Elora, because I need you.”

She smiled, beautiful and radiant and genuine and directed at me. After so long, that damned smile was mine, and my heart sang for it. She lifted her hands back to my cheeks and pulled me down to her as she arched back, drop after raindrop rolling down her face, her hair, her body. My rain consumed her, just as she had consumed me all those years ago.

“You don’t need me to free you,” she whispered. She pulled my hand from her chin and placed my fingers to the pulse point on her throat. Her heart beat erratically but repeatedly—unending. “Love me and release yourself. Love me because we’re alive, and this life is meant to be lived. Free yourself and live with me, because I need you too, the real you. Not Wryn. Not the cold Vaelor I’ve known these past few weeks. The one who wrote me letters and taught me how to paint and laughed and shared and surprised me for my birthday. Love me.”

It was as if the wool had been pulled from over my eyes, a weight lifted off my chest, like I sucked in air for the first time, because she wasn’t asking me to simply love her. She was asking me to stop fighting it and allow myself to love her, freely and openly and wildly—the way she deserved.

Everyone dies, but not everyone lives.

I decided, right then and there, within her hold, with her glorious smile and sky-blue eyes and thumping heart, that I would live. With her. Because of her. Because even a second of this had to be worth it. It had to be. I couldn’t imagine anything or anyone ever being more worth it.

I slipped my hand farther around her throat until my entire hand wrapped around it, and I walked her back step by step. Her grin grew devilish, deliciously wicked—the embodiment of temptation.

That was what she had always been, right? Temptation, but I hadn’t realized just how much she offered. Lust, yes, but love? Happiness? Freedom?

She offered me the world, and I had the audacity to refuse her. Not anymore. I was done making a fool of myself.

“I do love you, Elora.” I kissed her soft lips, her cheek, her jaw. “I’ve been in love with you since the moment you kicked your shoes off in that damned orchard.”

My mouth trailed down her neck to where it met her shoulder, and something sparked within me, hotter than anything I’d ever felt. My chest burned, my cock ached, and my heart felt like it might burst.

Suddenly, I was overwhelmed.

I nipped at her skin, and she gasped, arching farther into me. I bit harder, and her whimper reached my ears. She sank her nails into my back but didn’t stop me.

“I want to break your skin, taste you, and fill you with my storms. I want to spark your soul and mark you permanently so the entire realm knows you’re mine, and I’m yours.” Lightning cracked across the sky on that last word. It struck the ground behind me, but I didn’t care, and neither did she. She didn’t startle or flinch. She didn’t even pull her gaze from mine.

Lightning struck again and again as the urge consumed me, and when she nodded, her lips parted, I smirked and ran my thumb along her bottom lip again. “Do you know what that would mean, Elora? Truly?”

She shook her head, waiting on bated breath.

“It would mean you’d never be free of me. No matter how far you go, no matter how many years pass, you would never be free, but I would be yours, utterly and completely yours, to hold, to kiss, to use, to fuck, to own.”

Slowly, I pulled her dress up and slid my finger up her thigh. She shivered, chills following my touch, but when I reached her cunt, everything turned blistering. Her knees threatened to give out, but I caught her with a groan. She was already soaked.

“But that would also mean you’re mine. This”—I sank two fingers into her, and she arched with a gasp—“would be mine, today and always. I’ll know when you need your mate, dear, sweet Elora, and I’ll have no objection to fucking you into oblivion every single time I get a hint of your arousal.”

I needed her to fully understand before she said yes, because I had a feeling when she unleashed me, I would never be restrained again—not with her.

She wouldn’t just be mine. I would be hers, permanently, in more ways than I already was, and damn, did I want that. I wanted her to have me, body, soul, and heart. I wanted to be consumed by her. I wanted to give my damned life to her because she deserved it more.

“I want to be yours, Elora,” I whispered. “Will you have me?”

She smirked, looking up and tapping her chin like she had to consider it.

A growl built in my throat, and I tightened my grip around hers, thrusting a third finger into her. “I’d say this needy little cunt wants me desperately, sun ray, wouldn’t you?”