Chapter Eleven #2
“You,” he said. “I want you. I want the bond, if you want it. I want to be whatever this is.” His voice was straightforward in the way that was particular to him—no performance, no management of my response. “That’s what I want.”
I looked at Malric.
He held my gaze. His jaw worked once.
He didn’t answer.
The silence stretched long enough to have a shape. I watched something move behind his eyes—calculation, or conflict, or something I didn’t have enough information to name—and I waited, and he said nothing, and the warmth in my chest began to contract.
He was still working out whether he wanted to want this.
I stood up.
Water sluiced off me. I stepped out of the basin without looking at either of them and took the linen from the rail and wrapped it around myself before I walked out of the bathing chamber into the nest.
I heard Thane say something behind me, low and sharp. I didn’t catch the words.
I gathered a dry shift from the shelf and pulled it on before I sat on the edge of the nest. With my hands pressed flat on my knees, I looked at the window. The sky grew dark.
They came to the doorway together.
I didn’t turn around. “I think we all need time to think.”
“Aveline—” Thane said.
“I’m not angry.” It was mostly true. “I just—” I stopped.
Found the correct words. “I have spent my entire life being a decision someone else made. I would like, just once, to be a decision someone makes clearly. On purpose.” I turned then and looked at Malric, because he was the one this was for.
“When you know what you want, you can tell me.”
His face was blank, perfectly controlled and might have been something else entirely.
“I’d like you both to go. Please.”
Thane looked at Malric. Malric looked at me for one long moment with an expression that almost cracked into something legible, and then he turned and walked down the stairs. Thane crossed to me first, kissed my forehead, and didn’t say anything, which was the right choice.
Then he followed.
I sat in the quiet of my nest and listened to their footsteps descend and let the warmth of the bath and the food and the careful tenderness of the last hour settle into me alongside the ache of that silence. I could hold both. I’d been holding harder things than that my entire life.
The two threads in my chest were still there.
I pressed my hand against my sternum and felt them, one and then the other, and thought about what Malric’s face had looked like in that last moment before he turned away.
Almost, I thought.
Whatever he was afraid of, it had almost lost.
Thane
Ifound him where I expected to.
The library, third floor, standing at the window with his back to the room and his hands clasped behind him.
The posture he used when he was thinking hard enough that he needed to look at something that wasn’t going to look back.
Outside the glass, the trees were dark shapes against a darker sky, and Malric was watching them with the focused stillness of a man conducting an argument with himself.
I closed the door behind me.
“Don’t,” he said, without turning around.
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You’re about to say something I don’t want to hear.”
I crossed the room, dropped into the chair nearest the cold fireplace and stretched my legs out before I looked at the back of his head.
I was tired. The kind of tired that lived in the bone, the residue of hours of holding someone through something that had taken everything I had to give without taking what I’d wanted to. I was also frustrated.
“We’re here for a reason,” I said.
“I’m aware of why we’re here.”
“Are you?” I watched his shoulders. “Because from where I’m standing, you just sat in a bath with a woman we’ve both now seen fall apart, a woman who asked you a direct question and deserved a direct answer, and you gave her nothing.”
His shoulders didn’t move. “I gave her space.”
“You gave her silence and called it consideration.” I leaned forward, forearms on my knees. “She’s not a tactical problem, Malric. She’s not something to manage while you work out the optimal response.”
He turned from the window then. His face was composed, which meant the opposite of what it would have meant on anyone else.
“You’re awfully quick,” he said, “to remake everything for an omega you met three days ago. Particularly given that a few days ago you accused me of doing exactly that.”
The words cut like a sword. He’d meant them to.
I sat with it for a moment, because that was the honest thing to do.
He wasn’t wrong about what I’d said. I had accused him of pulling away, of growing cold, of choosing the rebellion over us so many times there was barely an us left to choose.
I had said it in the middle of a fight in the dark, three nights before we’d ever found this tower, and I had meant it.
“I remember what I said,” I told him.
“Then you understand why I’m cautious about your sudden certainty.”
“I’m not walking away from you.” I held his gaze. “That’s the difference. I’m not replacing anything or leaving anything behind. I’m making room.” I paused. “There’s enough room. You know there is.”
Something crossed his face and was immediately filed away.
He moved to the table and picked up one of the maps he’d left there, looked at it without seeing it, and set it back down.
A Malric displacement behavior—touching objects when he needed a moment to think, without appearing to need a moment to think.
I’d cataloged all of them over the years. He had more than he realized.
“We came here for a weapon,” he said.
“I know.”
“The rebellion is running out of time. We have maybe two months before the king’s eastern coalition consolidates and we lose the window entirely.” He pressed two fingers to the map. “We need what we came for.”
“I know that too.”
“Then you understand that I can’t afford to—”
“Have you noticed that you’re more stable around her?”
He stopped.
I let it sit.
“Think about it,” I said. “Not right now, not this week. Before we found the tower, how long had it been since you slept more than a couple of hours at a time? How many times in the past month did I have to talk you down from a decision you would have made wrong because you were running on nothing?” I watched his jaw set.
“Two days in this tower with her nearby and you slept. I watched you do it. You were under the same roof as her and you slept six hours without waking.”
“That’s not—”
“It matters. It shows that she means something. To both of us. My magic is more settled, more controlled. Our bond is strengthening, expanding to let her in. I can even feel your magic rising to the surface. She could break your bond.”
The silence that followed had a different quality than the ones before it.
Malric looked at me. He struggled with words, wanting to argue with me, yet he had sensed the same things I had and had nothing to say.
“Only my mate can break the curse,” he said. His voice was careful. “That’s not necessarily—”
“She could be. We know that we’re not fated mates.
Or at least we’re not complete. Maybe she’s showing us what it was always missing.
” I stood up. “We already think she amplified the king. That his power has been running partly on hers for years.” I crossed toward him.
“What if that’s what she does? Not a weapon that destroys.
A bond that makes what’s already there stronger, more stable, more complete.
” I stopped a few feet from him. “Imagine what you could do if you weren’t white-knuckling your own control every hour of every day.
Imagine what I could do if my storms had an anchor that actually held. ”
“So you want her because she’s useful,” he said flatly. “That’s your argument.”
The deliberate misreading of it was so characteristic that I almost laughed.
“I want her because she feels like another part of my soul. Like you do.” I held his gaze. “The way you felt the first time I understood who you were underneath all of that. Like something I hadn’t known was missing until I was standing next to it.”
His expression shifted fractionally, tightened around the eyes, and immediately shut down.
“Three days,” he said, but it was quieter than before.
“I knew in less than one,” I said. “You did too. You’re just better at pretending you didn’t.”
He turned back toward the window. He was tense, his shoulder set rigidly, like a man standing in a strong wind who refuses to lean into it.
I thought about Aveline sitting on the edge of her nest with her hands flat on her knees, looking at the darkening window.
The way she’d said when you know what you want, you can tell me, with her voice absolutely level and her eyes reflecting hurt.
She’d been managing her own hurt alone for years, and it had been one of the hardest things I’d watched, and I had seen some hard things.
“She asked us what we wanted,” I said to his back.
“She asked because it mattered to her. Because she is, for possibly the first time in her life, trying to make a choice that belongs to her, and she wanted to know if what she was considering was real or if she was alone in it.” I paused. “You left her alone.”
“I didn’t say no.”
“You didn’t say anything, Malric,” I snapped.
“You sat there. You weighed it. You calculated the risk and you said nothing. So she stood up, wrapped herself in linen, and sent us out. She was very composed about it, and that’s somehow worse.
” I shook my head. “She’s been managed by people who said they love her all her life.
She knows exactly what that looks like.”
He was quiet for a long time.
Outside the window, the wind had picked up, whipping through the trees at the perimeter of the tower’s grounds.
I sensed it in a peripheral way—my magic was always more active when I was restless.
I reached for the thread connecting me to Aveline, the weak and tenuous bond, and slowly calmed.
The wind outside also gentled to a breeze.
The action wasn’t lost on Malric, who glanced at me, a dark look on his face.
Once, I would have reached for our bond.
Choosing Aveline was telling him something. Now it was his turn to make a choice.
“You need to decide. Not for the rebellion. Not for me. And not because the timing is right or the tactical logic holds. Decide what you want, and then go tell her, or don’t.
” I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair.
“But do it before you lose us both. Because I won’t watch her go through what’s coming alone because you needed another week to be certain about something you’ve already been certain about since the moment you heard her voice through that wall. ”
I moved toward the door.
“Thane.”
I stopped but didn’t turn around.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. I could hear him breathing, steady and controlled, the breath of a man keeping himself in careful order.
“I know,” he said finally. Quiet. A concession he hadn’t meant to make out loud.
It wasn’t enough. Not yet.
But it was the most honest thing he’d said since we walked through the tower door, and I recognized the cost of it the way I recognized all his costs, because I’d been paying attention for three years and I wasn’t planning to stop.
“I’m going back upstairs. Come when you’re ready.”
I opened the door and went up.