Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
Rowan
Evening slants through the canopy cover of the Blackwood. Adelasia tosses and turns in her sleep while Kaius and I keep watch over her. He’s been quiet since Adelasia nearly tore him apart with her words, lashing out in the only safe way she knows how.
I suppose we should all be a little thankful the venom spilled from her lips and not from the magic within her.
Kaius is sitting on an overturned log, and I join him, where I let him ignore me for a while.
Adelasia had every right to be upset, but I saw the look on Kaius’ face when he thought he had lost her for good, and…
I don’t know. I had to do something, and my words left my mouth before I could think twice about them.
When she turned that look on me, that betrayed, raw, trembling hurt mixed with the rage of a queen, I took it.
She took it as truth.
But Kaius and I? We know it was a lie.
“Has she always been so restless in sleep?” I ask Kaius, watching her continue to toss and turn.
“Only when something is bothering her,” he whispers. A small string of moonlight breaking through the trees casts light on his cheekbone, highlighting the undeniable face of guilt. “Why…why would you do that for me?”
I think about it for a while, wanting to make sure I choose my words truthfully and carefully. “Because I couldn’t stand to watch you lose someone you love again. Of all the things she has on her shoulders, I didn’t want there to be another wedge between you.”
He turns fully to face me on the log. The look he gives me isn’t sharp. It’s worse. It’s careful. “She had every right to be upset,” he says. “She had every right to choose where that anger landed. You decided for her.”
“I did,” I say. “And I’d do it again.”
“Rowan.” He says my name like he’s scared of saying it, or like it’s a debt I’ll one day claim. “She might never forgive you.”
“I can live without her forgiveness, Kai. I cannot live watching you lose the one thing you waited an eternity to find.”
He flinches—not physically; his control is too disciplined for that.
“Her mother’s letter,” he manages finally.
The words scrape him raw on the way out.
“It wasn’t an accident. It was fear. I held it.
” He flexes the fingers of his right hand, remembering, and the knuckles look whiter than bone.
“Every time I was going to send it, I thought of the Priestesses and I thought them punishing her through a mother who had no defenses left. It was before I realized I was in love, but then—” He swallows.
It sounds like it hurts. “Then I waited too long to tell her I’d never sent it.
But the way she spoke about her mother and family… I never thought…”
“I know,” I say. “I know why you did it.” It isn’t complicated at all. He was afraid to lose her, so he risked losing her another way.
“Then why not let me take what follows?” He looks back at me, and there’s blood in his gaze that has nothing to do with fangs. “I don’t need a savior.”
“You need a chance,” I say. “You made a mistake. A big one. You know it as well as we all do, but this doesn’t have to be the end. Not after what you two have been through.”
Silence again. But not the ugly kind. The kind made when two men collect the same grief and try not to spill it. He turns away and says, very quietly, “Thank you.”
It knocks something loose in me I did not come here prepared to lose.
I force a brightness into my voice that isn’t false so much as tilted. “Don’t thank me yet. She may still decide to torch me with that magic of hers.”
“She won’t,” he says, too quickly, and then catches himself. “She might.”
“I’m counting on it.” I smile without showing teeth. “The fire is the part that means she still wants to be heard. Silence is the most frightening thing about her.”
“You’re not afraid of her wrath?”
“I’m terrified.” I admit. “But fear is easier to swallow than regret. I know that better than most.”
His eyes soften in a way that would have unmade me a long time ago. “Tell me the rest,” he says. “Why else would you do this?”
Because I am a man built from desire, and I have learned how to aim it. Because I loved him first and wrong and then differently and still. Because I see her in ways she desperately needs to be seen.
“There are enough knives in the world trying to turn you against each other. I have no interest in sharpening one more.”
He doesn’t answer. He moves closer instead, close enough that our breath mixes in the air between us.
It occurs to me that in another version of this life, we would have ruined each other on this forest floor. It occurs to me that in this one, we are trying very hard not to.
He studies me for a long time, and I let him. The night grows deeper. At last, he reaches across the wreckage of our truth and puts his hand over mine.
We have done this before—in grief, in rage, in beds we should not have shared. We have never done it like this: still, simple, human.
“I have waited a long time,” he says, “to find love that did not ask me to become a weapon.”
“And?”
“And I would rather lose everything else than lose that.” He swallows. “Even my pride. Even the version of myself that always needs the final word.”
“We’ll make sure you don’t,” I say.
“We?”
“You and me and her. The kind of ‘we’ that survives angry nights and unsent letters.”
“You’re assuming she will come back.”
“She always comes back to you, does she not? And when this is over, you will tell her why you were afraid. Not as a defense. Not as an excuse. As a confession.”
We sit like that for a while.
Two stubborn men holding hands through the dark of night.
“Rowan,” he says without looking at me.
“Yes?”
His lips touch mine for a fleeting second. “For what it’s worth, I would have done the same for you. Maybe not then–not before. But now.”
As he pulls away, I pull him back.
And this time, I don’t let him slip away.