Chapter 42 Aldric
Chapter forty-two
Aldric
The door to Sera’s study clicked shut behind him with a finality that rattled through his bones. The room was just as he remembered it: neat and tidy—save for the maps and papers strewn across the desk. A fire crackled in the fireplace, making the room warm.
Too warm. The heat pressed against him, making the space feel too close. Too small.
Too dangerous.
Sera hovered near the center of the room, just before the hearth, worrying her hands together, her shoulders tense beneath the soft velvet of her gown. Red. She wore red today.
The fire glowed brightly behind her, catching against the strands of her hair and revealing hidden glints of red and gold among the brown—like smoldering embers, as if she carried a touch of the sun with her wherever she went.
His throat tightened.
This was a mistake. A terrible mistake.
He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t possibly do this.
“Aldric?” his kirei whispered, for once sounding a little young, a little unsure. “I have always wondered…” Almost shyly, she peeked toward him, gouging his heart just a little bit more. “What are you thinking about when you look at me like that?”
He swallowed hard. For a moment, he considered lying. Pretending as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. Pretending as if he wasn’t staring at her right at that moment, trying to brand every small detail about her into his mind.
Pretending as if he weren’t about to ruin everything.
But she asked him with such gentle uncertainty—such innocence—that the lies turned to ash in his throat.
“Sometimes,” he rasped, his voice cracking. Ugly and raw.
He cleared his throat and tried again. “Sometimes, you seem to glow a little.”
Her breath audibly hitched at his words.
He forced himself to continue, though each word stuck to his tongue, begging him to stay silent, to not tell her the truth. “And I just…I want to remember you like that, Sera. Glowing. Happy.”
For a few agonizing moments, she merely stared at him, her eyes wide. Speechless. Yet again, he had managed to render Seraphina de la Croix speechless. This time, he took no pleasure in it.
Especially not when she shakily drifted toward the chair behind her desk and sank into it, her porcelain features now ashen, as if she had just seen a ghost. Almost as if to herself, she whispered, “You see me like you do in my vision?”
The word vision snagged in his thoughts like a hook. “Your…vision?” he echoed, the hairs on his arm prickling. She had never spoken of her vision with him, not since the day in his bedchamber when he admitted he already knew about it.
Curiosity gnawed at him, warring with his guilt. He needed to tell her his own secrets.
But he wanted to know hers, too. He had to know.
Slowly, cautiously, he grabbed one of the spare chairs from in front of the desk and dragged it around until it rested beside hers. “Tell me about your vision, kirei,” he softly prompted while easing himself into that seat.
Hesitation wrote itself across Sera’s face. Uncertainty.
Until he tacked on a quiet, “Please.”
A humorless smile tugged at his wife’s lips. Now she avoided his gaze, her own eyes fixed on the desk, on the map of the known world unfurled there. Small stones in various colors littered the map, marking out threats within her borders.
And beyond, too.
One such marker rested in the forests of Drakmor, the name Bonesinger painted across its surface in her swooping hand. His chest tightened. Of course, she had been worrying for his homeland, too.
It shouldn’t have undone him. But it did.
“You will think me mad, Aldric—”
“I won’t,” he whispered, leaning closer. “I promise. I won’t.”
He watched her swallow. He studied the way she wet her lips. Finally, she exhaled, “I see you bound in chains,” and the room seemed to close in further. The floor seemed to tilt. The fire in the hearth sputtered, nearly winking out.
The breath rushed out of him as if someone had just driven a fist into his gut.
As if from far away, his kirei’s voice echoed, “We are in a wasteland filled with black sand. It is night.” But he was no longer in the study. He was no longer anywhere but in his awful dream.
His wretched nightmare.
“…I try to free you, but I never can…”
Kneeling on black sands with Sera dead at his feet.
“…the stars are falling…the darkness is coming…the world is ending…”
While that cold voice taunted him and called him a monster.
Clenching his eye shut, he tried to blot the memory from his mind, to snuff it out completely. He didn’t want to remember her like that. He didn’t want to think about what might have been.
“Aldric?”
His eye flashed back open. He was in the study with Sera, her lovely face hovering close to his. Too close. Clearing his throat, he twitched away from her and rasped, “I’m fine.”
But his hands trembled, betraying him.
He clasped them together and squeezed hard, refusing to let her see.
His kirei frowned, worry etching itself between her eyebrows. “I am sorry,” she whispered, as if she had anything at all to be sorry about. “I know it is…” She swallowed. “Unsettling.”
“No,” he bit out, shaking his head, denying it hotly. “You have not unsettled me.”
A question nagged at the back of his mind—a question to which he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear her answer. But still, he asked, “Is there…a voice in this vision?”
“Voice?” Her lips trembled around the word. “Why do you ask?”
He knew he should tell her about his own dream, so like the vision she just described. She deserved to know she wasn’t alone in these visions. But telling her would mean admitting what he’d done with the witchblade.
And he couldn’t. Not yet.
“After the wedding, you mentioned a voice,” he reminded her, hedging around the true reason for his curiosity.
The mere mention of the wedding was enough to see some color returning to his wife’s cheeks—a pretty splash of pink to breathe some life back into her features.
“Oh.”
The single word hung in the air between them.
He pursued her hesitation like a hound chasing a scent trail. “What did the voice say, kirei?” But still, she refused to answer, merely shaking her head.
Aldric gritted his teeth. What if it was the same voice from his dream?
No. It couldn’t be. What would that mean? Witchcraft? Some new, dark magic?
Something hunting her? Him?
…Them?
“Sera,” he tried again, his tone firm. “Please. Tell me what it said.”
“It said I could not save you,” she finally snapped, a frantic edge to her words.
Her blush deepened, burning in the firelight.
He grew quite silent, quite still, unable to look away as she softly continued to explain, “It was…when we kissed.” His kirei clenched her eyes shut, as if trying to remember.
Or to forget.
“I felt cold,” she recounted, almost too quietly for him to hear. “And then I heard a voice…a voice that claimed I could not save you.” Her eyes fluttered back open, but still she refused to look his way. “Because you already belonged to it.”
Unbidden, a harsh laugh scraped from his throat before he could bite it back. Too loud in the closeness of the study.
Sera flinched away from him. “This is not funny, Aldric.”
His fleeting amusement—brief and brittle as it was—died instantly. “No, kirei,” he rasped, the words tumbling out rougher than he intended. He leaned toward her, instinct overriding caution. His chair scraped softly against the floor. “I wasn’t laughing at you.”
Her chin lifted a fraction, stubborn as ever. “It sounded like you were.”
Hurt. He could hear the hurt in her voice.
“Sera…” Without thinking, he reached for her, his fingers brushing the back of her knuckles. And though she trembled at his touch, she didn’t flinch away, not even when he slowly wrapped his hand around hers.
Her skin was like silk beneath his callused fingertips—flawless, perfect, everything he was not. He was unworthy of touching her, of holding her. He knew that.
But he could no longer resist.
“Sera,” he tried again, luring her gaze back to him at last. Her eyes shimmered in the firelight—like wisps of smoke swirling behind glass panes, giving him the illusion that he could see within, that he could spy what she was thinking.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t penetrate that veil.
“I laughed because that voice lied to you. I belong to no one,” he snarled softly, not at her—but at the memory. At the echo of that voice. At the idea of being claimed by anything in this world or the next. “And nothing.”
But even as he said it, even as the words tore from him like a vow, he heard the lie echoing within them. No. No, that wasn’t true. That hadn’t been true for some time.
The truth hit him with the force of a warhammer crunching against his sternum and ripping through his chest, carving out a hollow where her memory could reside once he tore everything else apart.
His gaze dropped to their joined hands, her smaller fingers enclosed in his, her pulse fluttering against his thumb. Swallowing hard, he dragged that thumb lightly across her skin—slowly, helplessly—committing the thrum of her heartbeat to memory.
“Aldric?” his kirei whispered. So soft. So sweet. So hopeful.
“I’m here,” he rumbled, lifting his eye back to hers, longing to lose himself in her stormy gaze one last time. Beneath his thumb, her pulse quickened.
At the sensation, his heart forgot how to beat. Could it be possible?
Could it truly be him making his wife’s heart race?
His breath shuddered out. A single moment passed. Then two. A confession pressed against his throat, desperate to be loosed. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t say it. It made him too vulnerable. Weak.
But he couldn’t hold it back. Not anymore.
If he didn’t say it now, he never would.
Bracing himself for her inevitable rejection, he blurted, “I belong to no one but you.”
Silence swallowed the room whole. And in that silence, Sera simply stared at him, her eyes wide. With pity? Horror? He couldn’t tell. He didn’t know.
He almost didn’t want to know.
Idiot. Fool. What had he done? His confession lingered in the air between them, twisting like a knife. Shame burned across his skin. Without a word, he released her hand and jerked back a fraction.
What had he been thinking?
He opened his mouth, desperate to claw the words back, to offer up some half-muttered apology that would patch over the wreckage he’d just made. But what could he possibly say?
“I—” he began, voice cracking. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have—”
He didn’t get the chance to finish.
Because one moment, Sera was simply sitting there, staring at him.
And in the next, she was leaning in to crush her mouth against his.
The warmth of her lips burned away what remained of his thoughts, his fears. Not because she had scorched him again, no. But because she was her.
Because beautiful, proud, clever Seraphina de la Croix was kissing…him.
Not for duty. Not for show. Not for a crowd.
But simply because she wanted to.
Her hands fisted in the collar of his undershirt, holding him as if afraid he might vanish. Her breath trembled against his lips, fanning the impossible hope sparking to life inside his heart.
And he drowned, lost. Lost in her. Lost in his want. His need.
He wanted this. He wanted her. He needed her.
I love you. I love you. I love you. Those words pounded through his skull in time with the racing of his heart. He loved his wife. He loved her even though she drove him mad.
Perhaps…perhaps he didn’t have to tell her everything.
Perhaps he could keep this last secret—this one unbearable truth—locked away.
He kissed her deeper, memorizing the warmth of her lips, the trembling of her breath, the familiar whisper of vanilla rising from her skin. But then another thought struck him.
…What if she loved him too?
“Stop,” he gasped, ripping his mouth from hers like a man tearing a dried bandage from a wound. He had to tell her now. Before it was too late. Before he lost his nerve.
Before he let himself truly hope.
She drew back, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, her chest rising and falling in uneven breaths. Confusion flickered across her features and something else.
Dread.
His own breath rattled through his chest, each inhale a knife twisting deeper. “Sera,” he managed, his voice raw, “I have to tell you something.”
Her hands slipped from his collar. She straightened slowly, retreating from that intoxicating nearness until she sat rigidly upright in her chair. “Why do I get the feeling,” she whispered, “that it is something I do not want to know?”
He nearly barked out a laugh—bitter, cracked, wild. He swallowed it down.
“Because you don’t,” he hoarsely confirmed. “Because you’ll hate me once I say it. But I have to tell you anyway.”
The truth was like broken glass in his mouth.
Each shard sliced deeper as he forced himself to continue.
“That night in your bedchamber with the assassin…” His voice failed.
He swallowed hard. “…He wasn’t the one carrying the witchblade.
The assassin wasn’t from Arath at all, Sera. He was from Edmund.”
Her face went still. Perfectly, horrifyingly still.
There it was. The look he knew too well. The look every woman eventually gave him.
Horror.
Nausea ripped through him. But he couldn’t stop. Not now.
“It was me,” he bit out, forcing each word from his mouth. “I was carrying the witchblade that night. And I had every intention of using it on you before the other assassin arrived.”