Chapter Twenty-Seven
Gerard
What the fuck, Adeline?
Her arms slid over his shoulders, jolting free a shower of memories that seeped into his muscles and guided his every move. Fingers in her hair, tongue sliding past her lips, hand tugging her closer by the waist. She moaned into his mouth. Moaned. All the Damned daughters.
What the fucking fuck, Adeline?!
It had been years since either of them had tapped out the little message on the other’s arm.
The code that was all their own, that had once meant I need you to pretend for a moment.
They’d used it to ward off unwanted advances back in the murky, tender months that followed the end of their romance—and, Ger suspected, sometimes just as a flimsy excuse to revisit what they’d once had.
That had been true for him, at least, for a long time.
Too long, probably. Which was why his skin had recognised the pattern at once, moments before his brain caught on.
It seemed to remember other touches too—the way her bottom lip fit in the curve between his own, the warmth of her hands on his shoulders.
It was not unpleasant by any stretch of the imagination, but it was also not—
Right. Not right. Not anymore.
Ger pulled back, arms still around his best friend’s waist as she stared up at him with that look on her face that he didn’t think he’d ever see again, and actually really did not want to see.
What the fuck, he thought, again and again and again.
His heart was thundering, but it lent him a sort of urgency that was pretty bloody useful for once, when he finally found his voice.
“Get out,” he intoned, without looking around—though he could tell that the other gards still stood frozen by the door.
Likely as shocked as he was, though he certainly hoped he was hiding it better.
He shot them a withering glare, and found them staring slack-jawed right back at him.
“She’s not going anywhere right now. Get the fuck out. ”
With a soft gasp, Adeline reached up to draw him back to her kiss, and finally, fucking finally, he heard the shuffle and grumble and eventual catch of a lock that told him they were alone.
Ger broke away with one swift backward stride and a wild look thrown at the door.
When he turned around, Adeline wasn’t there; she’d hurried over to the mantelpiece and picked up a decorative rock the size of her fist. Ger followed her, his strides long and panicked.
“What,” he whisper-shouted as he drew even with her, “the fuck, Adeline?”
She glanced up, wincing. “That bad, huh?”
Ger’s breath hissed out of him so hard that even his heart seemed to deflate under the pressure.
He was in no mood for jokes, couldn’t have spared the breath to laugh even if it’d been funny.
He raked a hand through his hair, tugging at the roots like the sting might spur his bodily functions into action, kickstart his heart and his lungs.
But Adeline just turned and hurried off again, this time to pull a sheet of paper from a drawer, then raced back to the settee and settled on her knees before the low table.
“Could you stand still for a minute? What are you doing? And again, may I ask, what the fuck?”
“I’m sorry, I know, just—”
She flapped her hand at him, somehow both impatient and apologetic. Ger gaped at her, and to her credit, she did spare him a glance, just long enough to flash him her round, pleading eyes.
“Come sit down,” she coaxed. “I need to be quick, but I promise I’ll explain in a moment.”
Ger spluttered wordlessly, but since she was intent on ignoring him, he could do little more than stare at her—then at the door.
How long did they have? Twenty minutes? More?
He supposed it depended on his fellow gards’ estimation of his stamina.
Which meant that if they returned in under an hour, he’d have a rather annoying point to prove the next time they took to the frigid training yard.
Swearing under his breath, Ger finally staggered over to the settee and stripped off his sheath and sword.
Adeline was scrawling something on the sheet of paper as he sank into the couch.
His armour clanked at his movements, then again when he dragged his hands over his face.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” he groaned into his palms.
The cushions shifted, Ade finally heaving herself off the floor to settle beside him.
“I know,” she said, slightly breathless. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you really don’t know. The last thing we need right now is to spark a jealous rage—”
She pried one of his hands away, unmuffling his voice just so she could interrupt his spiral.
“Kai’s a little more reasonable than that.”
His head snapped up.
“I’m not talking about your bloody Merrow King, Ade.”
“Then who—” A frown flickered before her brows pitched into an arch. “Oh. Oh. There’s someone else?”
He blinked, and the “someone else” grinned at him behind his closed lids; straight black lashes, a plump and curving smile.
Someone else. Yes.
“No,” he said abruptly. Adeline still had that glossy rock in her hands, but she set it down on the side table—then cocked a brow, reading him with singular ease.
He’d missed that. Being seen, the way he always was with Ade.
Even if it was a bit inconvenient in that particular moment, she knew when he was lying, always had.
Luckily, he had a bit of truth to offer up this time. “Sort of. It’s Avette.”
“Avette?”
“Very one-sided,” he added quickly, then with a shaky scoff, “Daughters, give me some credit.”
Adeline softened and took his hand.
“You get all the credit in the world,” she told him earnestly.
“Well, of course I do, I’m a fantastic kisser.”
He raised a prompting brow at her silence, and Adeline scrambled to muster up an overenthusiastic nod.
“Oh, yes. Fantastic. It was very nice indeed, thank you.”
Ger snorted. He couldn’t help but think of Jack in that moment, how earnest and offhand he’d been when he called their kiss nice.
His lips tugged at the memory, but it was Adeline grinning back at him now, and he felt the shape of his own smile change into the one he held for her.
Not Jack. It was for the best, he reminded himself.
“You’re not madly in love with me then?” he asked of Adeline.
She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry.”
“You don’t want to run away together and bear me four little blond children?”
“Four children, with gigantic Leman heads?” She shuddered. “No, I think I’ll find it in me to move on.”
“My head is a perfectly healthy size, and you still haven’t told me why we were kissing.
” Ger shifted closer, dropping his tenuous grasp on the levity between them.
In its place, he took Ade’s hand and squeezed until she met his eye.
“I don’t think you understand what it means if this gets back to Avette.
What you saw back there, with Kai? That was her being gracious. ”
“I saw what she did to my father, Ger. I think I know what she’s capable of.
” Adeline dropped his gaze, but not his hand.
She squeezed it, drawing strength and a deep breath before she went on.
“And I know you’ve seen it all happen. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. What it might have brought up for you.”
He flinched at that; the suggestion of what it had brought up for Ger, personally, to see the sort of torment he’d grown up with and sworn he’d never abide again.
And still, he’d stood by for all these months and watched it happen.
Protected his own skin, just as he had for all those years under his step-father’s roof. Until, of course, he hadn’t.
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you,” Ade whispered. The crack of her voice drew him back to himself, and he fixed her with a fierce glare.
“I am glad you weren’t here—”
“But I’m not,” she cut in, just as fiercely.
“I’m not glad. I want to be there for you when you need me, and you needed me.
Look, I promised you she wasn’t going to hurt me, and I meant it, so now I’m going to make you another promise.
She won’t hurt you or anyone else. Ever again. Because we’re going to stop her.”
Ger’s chest gave a half-hearted flutter at that. He wanted to believe her. He wanted to be relieved, comforted, over-fucking-joyed, but—
“You can’t stop her, Ade. No one can.”
“No one has,” she corrected at once. Then Adeline turned and picked up the glossy rock from the table, waving it meaningfully under his nose.
“You’re going to beat her over the head with a rock?” he deadpanned.
A laugh ghosted over her breath.
“Maybe,” she shrugged. “But this is a conch shell. My father gave it to me after our summer in Dhalias. When I was little, remember?”
Ger nodded. He hadn’t known her back then, but he knew about that Dhaliaan summer.
It was practically mythic, foundational lore in the story of Adeline’s life.
Salt and sand and citrus, and freckles on the bridge of her nose that had never really faded.
They stood out a little darker now that she’d returned.
She’d always said she’d go back one day, but he never got the sense she believed it.
He knew for certain that she’d been expecting a slightly more magical homecoming than the one she got; a dawnbreak escape after an attempt on her life.
“I was homesick for a place that could never be my home, and Daughters, I was so angry at him.” Adeline paused to struggle with her breath a moment, and he knew she was willing herself not to cry by the jarring brightness that burst into her next few words.
“He brought me this as a peace offering, and said it was a different kind of magic. He said I could hear the oceans all over Adhlas if I pressed it to my ear; that I’d hear the waves whispering to me from Dhalias, too. ”
Adeline held the conch out in offering, and Ger took it gently, turning it with the care he understood it warranted.
It was a pale, shimmering blue on the outside and oddly shaped, with one tapered end like a cone and a lip that curled back to reveal a cavity of glossy shell.
She gave a prompting wave, and he lifted it to his face, sealing the glossier side over his ear.
He couldn’t hear anything at first, but with some focus, he picked out a distant, rhythmic hush.
Probably his own blood echoing in the shell’s cavity, he reasoned, but all the same, something tightened in the space between his heart and his gut that all his darkest memories seemed to occupy.
Memories of his mother, who had wanted to travel the Crossing just as Ade had.
Who had promised him they’d be free to do so one day.
We’ll see the oceans, Gerry, just you and me. We’ll bathe in free-flowing waters, warmed under the sun.
And though Ger had eventually freed them both, they never did make that trip either together or apart. To this day, he had never seen or heard those free-flowing waters.
“That’s what it sounds like?” he asked softly, and Ade smiled as if she knew. Which, of course, she did. She was the only person he’d ever told.
“Soothing, isn’t it?”
Ger held on a little while longer, and she let him, just watching with a pained sort of fondness. It was entrancing, that faraway rush.
“I can see why you thought it was magic,” he said when he finally handed it back.
“Well,” said Ade, slowly turning the shell in her hands again, “that’s the thing. It is magic. You can hear the whisper of the waters, but there are some messages that come through a lot clearer.”
She grinned then, bright enough to thaw the frost from the walls as she turned the conch outward for Ger to see.
Curled in its cavity was a small slip of paper that had absolutely not been there just a moment ago.
Ade pulled it out and set the conch down between them, eyes flicking eagerly over the scrap nearly as quickly as she unfurled it.
Her face dropped slightly, but then a soft rasp drew them both to the conch, and they watched as another slip of paper curled over the glossy lip. Gerard stared.
“Ade, what—Is that a note? Where did—”
Before he could even ask, the paper slid over the lip and fluttered into Ade’s waiting hand, pushed free by a third scrap. Adeline read them all, one after the other, breath catching on a delighted laugh. She thrust the scraps of paper into his hands, clumsy with relief.
“I told you,” she breathed. “Some messages come through clearer.”
Ger gaped at the ribbons of paper and ink in his palms. He was more inclined to believe the conch had really played him the sounds of the Dhaliaan ocean than to believe it had delivered the words scrawled out before him.
Received, and awaiting instruction, said the first.
The next, in another hand, Sorry about that, someone seems to have taken your warning for anonymity a little too seriously and erased their entire personality. Glad you’re safe. We are too!
And a third hand; Safety is all well and good, but please don’t leave me down here with these two for long! They’re terribly boring, and I have nothing to read.
“This is Kai’s court,” said Ger, realising aloud.
“So much for anonymity,” said Adeline.
“But Eleni abducted you, she gave up the Merrow—”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”
Ger could hear the grin in her voice even before he looked up at her—and when he did, he really took a moment to look, for the first time since he’d raced to find her in that hallway.
Her curls were longer and wilder, sun-kissed streaks of bronze and gold coiling through the dark brown.
Her skin was sun-kissed too, freckles standing out on a slightly fuller face.
She looked healthy and cared for, even if exhaustion tugged at her shoulders in that particular moment, drawing them inward in contrast with the curl of her smile. His beautiful, brave friend.
She really did have a plan.
That hopeful warmth flickered in his chest again, and this time he let it simmer for a moment.
“So now what?” Ger asked. “What do we do?”
Adeline’s entire face softened, her entire body, brow slack with relief and eyes at their warmest golden brown.
It was the “We,” he knew. The quiet acceptance, and the reminder that they were in this together, as they always had been.
Ger might have been a bloody coward, might have bowed to the panic that poisoned his blood, but with Adeline at his side, he could be brave. He could try.
“You’re sure?” she asked.
Even as he nodded, Ger felt his blood thicken and slow, his lungs spasm against that old reflex that stole through him and snatched at his breath. The fear was in him, and it probably always would be.
But he answered without hesitation. “Whatever you need.”
Adeline blew out a long breath and squeezed his hand.
“I need you to bring me to Kai.”