CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE #3
With a sigh, she continued, “It didn’t start that way, of course. We all got on rather splendidly the first while. Ethenn and I trained together most days, and we became . . . close, I think. At least, closer. I sort of assume I know what it’s like to have a little brother now.”
This elicited a chuckle from Deckard. “He’s more talkative when you get him alone, isn’t he?”
“That he is,” she agreed. Then she bit her lip. “He gave me your birthday gift.”
Deckard paused, meeting her eyes.
“It was beautiful,” she said, her voice weak with affection. “I’m rather disappointed, knowing that it’s lost to me forever now.”
“It’s a painting,” Deckard said kindly. “We can find another.”
Evylin’s chest expanded with tender emotion. “It was so similar . . .”
His smile practically made his eyes sparkle with triumph. “You noticed.”
“Of course, I did.” She felt her own smile falter. “I’m sorry that it’s gone.”
“As am I.”
The fondness in his gaze caused her hands to twitch. Subconsciously, she slipped to the edge of the couch, her feet all but begging her to go to his side.
Instead, she returned to her story. “Ilain and I grew close as well, and she told me about her family and their lifelong connection to the Alliance. And I’ve discovered she’s one of the better people I’ve ever met.”
Deckard nodded as though he’d already determined that for himself.
“But,” Evylin sighed, “Thom and Ethenn began to fight over her. I thought it was because they both had feelings for her when it turned out . . .”
“We don’t have to talk about that,” Deckard said, a flat edge to his tone.
Evylin met his gaze. “I think we do.”
The openness in his expression shuttered itself, his shoulders becoming rigid, but he didn’t stop her.
“Jonn,” she whispered, “I didn’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.” She leaned forward, her fingers gripping the cushions. “You have to know, I never would have befriended him, I never would have confided in him, had I known.”
“Evylin,” he replied, a severity coming into his stare that she wasn’t used to. “This isn’t about what you did or didn’t do. It’s about what Thom did, how he behaved.”
“But do you believe him?” she asked, daring to hold that hard glare. “His apology tonight, what he said to us before they took him away. Do you believe he means it?”
Deckard was silent. He rubbed his palms together, his thoughts so deep she could see the tension in his hunched form.
Whatever arguments raged within, they drove him from his seat.
He began to pace across the room, running a hand through his hair.
“I don’t know,” he muttered at last. “Of all men, I understand why he—why any man could love you—should love you. But my brother . . . It’s hard to believe that anyone could dupe themselves into having feelings simply out of competition. ”
“Perhaps,” Evylin offered, “his feelings were genuine but misinterpreted, as he suggested tonight.”
Deckard continued to pace. “You believe he loves you but is not in love with you?”
“Exactly.” She wanted to rise, to take his hand and make him look at her.
But she wasn’t ready yet to say the things she needed to, to make her confession.
“I think the only reason he pursued those feelings, incorrectly attributing more to them than he truly felt, was because he saw it as a chance to compete with you. He wanted to prove that he could beat you. But I don’t believe he ever thought he actually could, and that’s why he waited so long, why he even fought me tooth and nail before he ever tried to take me from you. ”
His pacing faltered as he stepped behind the far settee. He gave a forlorn-sounding chuckle. “I suppose he didn’t realize it wouldn’t matter. You weren’t mine anyway.”
“Don’t say that,” she whispered, her heart breaking at the thought.
After two weeks separating them, after the cold and lonely nights, after only finding sleep by dreaming of his presence again .
. . After her conversation with Hewitt’s ghost, Evylin had come to realize that somehow Jonn Deckard had become the person upon whom she relied.
He was her heart, and she never wished to be parted from him again.
Deckard met her stare, silent.
Something in his hesitation, his stoic resignation, emboldened her. He needed to know. If they were going to die tomorrow, she wanted to tell him. She held his gaze firmly as she spoke.
“I could never be anyone but yours.”
Deckard’s breath caught. Then his eyes fell away. “Evylin, you need to know something.”
His unexpected reply caused her to straighten in her seat.
“If we make it out of this alive,” he began, “I’m not . . . free. I promised Auden that when our mission with them is through, I will join the Alliance in whatever capacity they ask of me.”
Evylin blanched. “When did you make this promise?”
He tapped the back of the settee guiltily. “A little over three weeks ago.”
Doing a quick recounting of the time, Evylin realized that it would roughly coincide with the discovery of the writ. Her lips parted in shock. “Was this the price of my joining him in Dunneshead?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Jonn,” she said his name like an admonition, “please, tell me you didn’t sell your life purely to give me a break from the road.”
“You were drowning, Evylin. I had to save you.”
Knowing this was another result of her foolish fears, Evylin dropped her head in her hands.
She took a deep breath, then looked up, pushing the hair back behind her ears.
“So,” she concluded, “you made this promise knowing they’d want you to Bond with .
. . with me or another Warrior should I . . .”
His lack of response was all the confirmation she needed.
Evylin shook her head, a disbelieving laugh slipping out of her. Auden had taken Deckard at his word because they all knew: Deckard would never break a promise. His nobility and integrity were faultless. It was part of what made him so insufferably wonderful.
“All right,” Evylin said.
Deckard’s eyes narrowed. “All right?”
She shrugged. “You were a soldier when I married you. Your future was never yours to begin with. Why should it bother me now?”
His grip on the settee tightened. “Because if we remain married, they’ll require us to Bond,” he said as though it were a death sentence.
“I know what Hewitt meant to convince you of. Trust me, we talked about it plenty. But I will still give you an annulment if that’s what you want because if you stay with me, our future will be bound to the Alliance and . . . to each other.”
Evylin held his gaze unflinchingly. “Our future . . .” she whispered with a sad smile. “I’m afraid we might not have much of one.”
Rising from her seat, Evylin walked around the settee. She felt the need for distance, to put physical barricades between them as she worked to pull down the intangible ones she’d erected long ago. She needed the safety of separation before she could risk the fullness of vulnerability.
The rich velvet of the seat back tingled under her fingertips as she faced him once more. “Jonn, I was a fool,” she began, her voice soft and slow.
His chin lifted, brow pinched together as he listened intently.
Evylin couldn’t help smiling at that quirk of his. She adored that concerned wrinkle. “I convinced myself that I couldn’t be with you,” she admitted, “because I was afraid of you.”
Deckard’s lips parted, but he didn’t try to speak.
“The truth is,” she continued, “you scare me more than anything we’ve faced. You always have.”
Her breath caught as she forced herself to be brave. “I never wanted a normal life. Though I secretly dreamed I’d marry, I never believed I’d find someone who . . .” She paused, thinking of his criteria for a wife. “Who was enough,” she said tenderly.
He let out a singular, breathy scoff, turning away. She studied his profile, the angular lines noticeably Waulden now that she knew of his unexpected ancestry. He’d always had a regal bearing, something beyond the down-to-earth quality of Ephrian heritage.
“Then you came along,” she continued, “and you shattered everything I ever thought I wanted. You were good, clever, caring, and ambitious. You were handsome, too, though I didn’t want to admit it.”
He shook his head, though her compliments drew the corner of his mouth up in a smile.
“Beyond that, you were a captain—the very sort of man who could take me on all those adventures I’d dreamed about.”
Evylin forced herself to keep speaking as Deckard finally met her gaze again.
“It all terrified me. I’d never wanted to be alone, but I’d never wanted someone before either.
I—” Her words faltered as he began to walk around the furniture toward her, their gazes locked.
It was too soon. She wasn’t ready for him to be so close, to see her so wholly exposed.
As she stepped back, hand gliding over the golden rim of the settee’s back, he paused, only a few short strides separating them.
Evylin’s lungs grew tight in her chest, her breath coming in rapid bursts. “I didn’t know what to do,” she finally said. “And then Hewitt went and—and got us married.”
They both smiled at that.
“He has always given me everything I wanted. Even when I didn’t know what that was myself.”
Evylin swallowed down the rest of her fear, ready to reveal her whole heart to him.
“But even if he hadn’t,” she said, the words a whisper of sound in the grip of her emotions, “had the circumstances been different . . . Had you asked to write to me, to court me from a distance . . . I would have said yes.”
Her grip on the couch tightened, holding herself in place as he took one step closer.
“Had a year—or simply months—passed, and if you’d asked to marry me . . . I would have said yes.”
Deckard closed the gap, standing directly in front of her. She lifted her chin to stare up into his eyes, so brilliant and ever-changing. All it would take was a raised hand or the smallest lean in, and the space between them would dissipate.