Chapter 114
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN
T ime lost all meaning as I drifted between nothingness and pain.
I clung to the pain. To the sharp, rhythmic stinging in my chest, the agonizing tug of stitches pulled taut. To anything tethering me to this world and the woman in it that I would storms-damned well not leave behind.
I will always fight to make my way back to you.
Me, too, Lemmikki. No matter what it takes.
Her voice sounded panicked and too far away. I wanted to tell her it would be all right, to promise her that I was coming back, that nothing in this world or the next could keep me from her.
But no matter how hard I fought, the darkness claimed me once more.
My wife was yelling.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Isn’t it your entire job to know?”
A familiar slim hand gripped mine, fingers like ice. I tried to squeeze back, but my fingers wouldn’t move.
I’m right here, Lemmikki.
“It’s not anyone’s guess to me. He will wake up.”
Yes. I will.
But still, my eyelids remained frozen, my consciousness fleeing with all the warning of a dagger piercing into my skin.
My lemmikki wasn’t talking now.
I felt her at my side, felt her warmth pressed against my body and her energy forever calling to mine.
But she didn’t speak.
Her silence was worse than the yelling had been, bringing hazy memories of a black canopy shutting away a princess who was far too vibrant for the blanket of hush she had cocooned herself in.
She would not go back there. Hadn’t I promised I wouldn’t hurt her again?
I willed my eyes to open so I could look at her, give her some sign that I was coming back to her. It was like rolling boulders up a hill in a snowstorm, but I had not spent a lifetime training to fall short of this.
Not when I could feel her despair washing across my skin.
It took everything I had, but finally, I saw the briefest flash of light, a shadowy outline of crimson curls just before my eyelids snapped shut once more.
But it had been enough. She gasped, fingertips trailing along my forehead, my cheeks.
I was tired from the effort, drained from the monumental task of cracking open my eyelids. Blackness threatened to pull me under once more, until she sucked in a breath to speak.
“It isn’t ridiculous.” Her voice was a low murmur, raspy with disuse, and everything I needed to hold fast to the waking world. “To think that we were connected from the first time we danced. I look back, and I realize you were all I could see. The rest of the room, the world, fell away, and it was only you and your stupidly beautiful, frustrating face.”
I wished that my lips could move so I could smirk at her description.
Stupidly beautiful. Frustrating.
I could say the same, Lemmikki. And you were all I could see, too. All I wanted to see.
Her breath hitched on a sob that resonated in my own chest.
“Then you took me, and even when I wanted to hate you, I couldn’t. Because you saw me. And I saw you, too.”
It was true. For a woman who was rarely observant, she had read every one of the expressions I could hide from the rest of the world. I had hated her for that.
Loved her for that.
“I saw every last, jagged edge of who you were and loved you more for each one.” Her words were quieter now, like they were as much for herself as for me. “Maybe it’s because they resonated with the broken pieces of myself, or maybe we always would have been this way, perfectly fitted for one another.”
You are still not the broken one, Lemmikki . But I liked to think that she was right. That if we had met in another life, an easier life, we would have found our way to each other all the same. She still would have been all I could see.
“You said that you didn’t like who you were turning into when I came along, but you weren’t the only one. I was barely living my life, barely feeling at all, and then there you were.” The pace of her words sped up, like she was afraid that she would lose me before she could finish her story. “Making me furious. Making me feel things. Making me want to take a chance on something impossible.”
Her gentle fingers brushed against my forehead in a familiar pattern, her curls spilling against the bare skin of my shoulder.
“So I need you to come back to me, because we did it,” she whispered against my skin, breath ghosting along my cheek.
I cursed every part of my battered body for refusing to respond, to show her that I was here. That I hadn’t left her. That I never would.
“We did it together, just like we said we would.” She sounded close to pleading now, desperate and so endlessly broken that it threatened to fracture another piece of my chest. “We took that impossible chance, and even with all of the odds stacked against us, we won.”
Tears splashed on my skin, each one burning like another drop of acid. Then she audibly swallowed, shifting farther away from me.
“And it does not end like this.” The desperation from a moment ago had been replaced by pure steel, a low growl of unrelenting resolve. “So wake up,” she ordered. “Wake up and smirk at me and call me Lemmikki.”
And I tried. I fought harder than I had ever fought for anything in my life to obey, especially when her silence fell like the volley of a thousand arrows, each one piercing my flesh.
Keep talking, Lemmikki. This isn’t over yet. I swear it on my life, and on yours.
Instead, I felt the weight of her head on my shoulder, a river of tears flowing freely from the rupture in her soul. Sobs replaced her silence, each hitching breath spurring me onward.
Every time, her tears were my undoing, but this time I would use them to stoke the flames of the fragments of energy I had left.
I could wake up. I would, before she lost herself entirely to her own darkness.
Her breathing slowed to a lull, but still, I fought. I focused on each muscle in my body, clawing my way back to her, one stilted heartbeat at a time. With everything I had, I willed my lips to speak, my eyes to open.
Wake up and smirk at me and call me Lemmikki.
I never had been able to deny her anything.
I didn’t know how much time had passed before I saw it again, filtered hazy light resting on a cloud of crimson curls. This time, the vision stayed longer, giving me several seconds to examine the tearstained, shattered face of my sleeping wife.
It wasn’t enough.
When my eyelids closed again, I refused to let them stay that way. Over and over, I forced them open until consciousness fully settled in.
Pain rode heavy on its heels, but I didn’t care about anything that wasn’t the woman lying at my side, too quiet and too still and too small for all that she had done.
“Lemmikki.” The first time I said the word, it was barely above a whisper.
She didn’t stir, so I tried again, gaining more volume that time. That time she squeezed her eyes shut, like the sound was haunting her. She gripped my hand tighter in hers.
“Lemmikki, wake up,” I prodded her gently.
She let out another sob, shaking her head the barest fraction back and forth. I took the deepest breath I could manage against the searing agony in my chest and gripped her hand tighter in mine.
She froze for half a heartbeat before she finally opened her eyes, tilting her head up until they met mine.
She was so ashen, like the same blade that had carved into my chest had sliced into hers as well, draining her of every bit of life as surely as the blood had poured from my wound.
Her lips parted, a disbelieved huff of air escaping her in the single breath before her lips were on mine. Tears spilled out of her eyes as she alternated between sobs and kisses pressed against my skin.
Not through breaking, even now.
I thought again about when I had left her at that inn, then when I found her broken in her old bed. I had been so stupid. So convinced that she was strong enough to handle the weight of the world, to handle the same loss I couldn’t fathom facing on the other end.
Whatever force in the world had soldered our souls together was as inevitable as we were.
“I love you,” she breathed. “With every last broken piece of my soul, and when it’s whole, and everything in between.”
I strengthened my grip on her hand, the only way I could remind her that I was still physically here.
“I love you, too, Lemmikki.” I told her, my voice hoarse with the pain of seeing her this way. “Always.”
She lost herself to another wave of tears, burying her face in my shoulder with the weight of the grief that was slowly ebbing off of her. Finally, she took another shuddering breath, rolling to a seated position.
Her eyes flashed with uncertainty as she gently eased off the bed, like I would disappear the moment her back was turned. On hurried footsteps, she rushed to the door of the room we were staying in—which I noted, with relief, was not the same one we had been in last time we were in this palace, just before everything went to hell.
This room was vast and open, the accents of black and purple more subtle than they were throughout the rest of the palace, interspersed with softer shades of gray. I might not have known we were in the ostentatious palace at all, if not for the massive windows depicting the rolling hills of the Obsidian territory, along with the gleaming turrets twisting like a spire into the eastern sky.
It was strange to think back on our first visit to this place, on all the events that had started this war, and know that we had finally brought it to an end.
Cracking the door open, Rowan gave a low order to whoever was on the other side.
“Send for the healer. He’s awake.”
“Thank the storms.” Yuriy’s voice filtered in just before I heard the rapid sound of his retreating steps.
“How long have I been out?” I asked her, wondering at the open relief in my cousin’s voice.
And more than that, the shock.
My voice cracked on the last word, and Rowan reached for a water glass, sliding across the bed and holding it to my lips.
It took more effort than it should have to swallow down the water, but I did feel more alert after the cool liquid eased my parched throat.
“Nearly four days,” she answered as I took slow sips, her eyes darkening like that was a place she wasn’t ready to return to yet.
I nodded, instantly regretting it when a sharp, molten hot pang went through my chest.
“Is Iiro…” I trailed off, breathing through a fresh wave of pain.
“Imprisoned,” she confirmed. “He’s here until Theo takes him back to Elk.”
And she hadn’t even snuck down to murder him yet. She must have been truly unwilling to leave my side, since I was intimately familiar with the furious form her vengeance could take.
Still, I nodded again, keeping the motion more contained this time. She watched me with eyes that were still red from tears, underpinned by hollow purple circles.
“And you, Lemmikki?” I needed to know.
She didn’t quite smile, but her features eased. “Now that you’re awake? I’m perfect.”
I managed to force my lips up in a wan imitation of the smirk she had demanded from me.
“Well, you were always perfect. And Lemmikki?” I asked, thinking of all that she had said.
I needed her to understand that I had heard her. That she had brought me back with her words, with her unshakable faith, with the same force of nature she injected into everything she did.
That we had always been in this together.
She looked at me, her eyebrows raised in a question.
I fixed my gaze on her jade-colored eyes, infusing the smallest hint of teasing into my tone when I parroted her words back at her. “You made me feel things, too.”
For the first time, a real smile graced her lips as she brought them back down to mine.
The shifting of the bed brought another stab of agony to my chest, but I didn’t care. I would take the pain every time to be here with my lemmikki on the other side of this war.
She was still alive. Still here.
Still mine.