Chapter 14 #2
Another reason why I could not let myself feel. Those I cared about could be used against me. They always got hurt. And they had the ability to hurt me.
I spun away. I could not look at him for a second longer. I would slap him, or kiss him, or both. I’d touch him, and that would send me over a precipice that could only lead to disaster.
Isanara moved with me as I fled across the room to the oversized hearth. It was already roaring. Someone knew we would end up here. Would I ever be anything more than a pawn in other people’s games?
“You lied.” There was no mistaking the shake in my voice now, nor the emotion that caused it. Cold rage. “You are a subject of the fae king once again.”
“I am a subject of you, Koryn,” Garrick yelled.
He followed me across the room. I thought he’d shown me his emotions before? Now they were truly bared. He bore down on me, unbothered by the imposing difference in our height or the snapping of Isanara’s jaws in warning.
He threw out a hand, over his shoulder, vaguely in the direction of the door. “If you wish to flee, then we will flee.”
Garrick filled my vision, shrinking the room, but not me.
I glared up at him. “You would condemn your mother as easily as that.”
Even as I said it, I knew the response. I would not condemn her. Garrick knew that.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“I know you,” Garrick growled. The intensity and certainty of his voice should have felt unearned. “We will find a way out of this together. He means to make us uncomfortable, forcing us together when I have committed the ultimate betrayal. But it will not work, not the way that he thinks.”
“You think you can outsmart them.” I shook my head. “But you are wrong.”
I was wrong. I should not have stayed. The Dark God had manipulated me, I knew that.
I’d allowed it to happen. But it was a mistake.
What hope did I have of outsmarting the king of the fae and the head witch of the last remaining coven in Velora?
Together, they had a thousand years of scheming between them.
Garrick leaned closer. His body was inches from mine, but I knew instinctively that he would not touch me without my consent. Still, the intensity of his closeness pressed in, a hammer against the block of ice I’d built inside of myself.
If his body was the hammer, his words were a flame.
“They do not understand love,” Garrick said. His breath brushed against my face. “I love you, witch. Every piece of my heart that is mine to give belongs to you.”
What more could I ask for than that? I had pieces of myself that I’d been unwilling to give, or unable to. My dedication to Kyrelle had not stopped me from developing feelings for Garrick. One did not exclude the other. Until it did.
“You do not hurt the people you love,” I said. That was a lie. I’d loved my sisters. My father was not capable of such emotion, but my mother… she’d loved me, and she’d died just the same.
You hurt the people you love more profoundly than anyone else. Garrick knew it.
The touch of his gaze was as real as his hand would have been.
It mapped the lines of my face. First, my eyes.
His narrowed, focusing in on mine with excruciating intensity.
Then they slid to the side, following the line of my jaw until they arrived at my mouth.
My lips parted without my permission, asking for what my body wanted.
“You can only truly hurt the people you love,” Garrick said, eyes still on my mouth. “If you did not love me, this would not hurt so much.”
I would admit no such thing.
I slid away from him, the back of my shift catching on the carved mantelpiece behind me. It was already in tatters anyway.
Garrick let me go as far as the foot of the bed before he turned.
“I understand the gravity of what I have done. I have endangered your familiar and your quest for the gates. You asked me to protect your sister’s descendant, and I failed you. I have risked all of it.”
He folded his arms over his chest. My own eased slightly.
“But I will earn back your trust. I will beg your forgiveness on my knees during the day and between your thighs at night.”
Those thighs quaked. It was exhaustion, the adrenaline of the last few hours finally crashing out of my system. Not the promise he made.
Garrick stayed there, with his back to the mantle, several feet of space between us. But I felt just as affected by his presence as I had when we’d been inches apart. Even Isanara, half-lying on my bare feet, was not enough to separate us.
“Koryn,” he said, the words scraping past the emotion in his throat. “No matter how many gods we face or how many gates we conquer, you are the only altar that I worship at.”
The words were so beautiful. But they were just words, and I could not let myself believe them. Not when the ache of my separation from Isanara was still fresh inside me. Not ever.
I had to arm myself against his determination.
It shouldn’t be hard. I’d frozen him out for a reason, and he could give all the explanations he wanted, but it did not change what had happened. “You are still not telling me everything.”
The corner of his mouth twitched in the smirk that had become more familiar than my own face. “What do you wish to know?”
Everything. Nothing.
I wanted him to fill in the years between his arrival in Balar Shan and the night of Maura’s proposal.
Minutes in that throne room had been hell.
What had it been like for him to spend years here?
For him to watch his mother, a human, spend her limited mortal years in this fetid place?
It must have been excruciating. A torture not unlike my own, watching my sisters’ line struggle for life on this dying continent.
Isanara shifted her weight. She drew me back to the present, again. If it wasn’t intentional, it was damned lucky.
I could not let myself feel anything for Garrick, not even pity.
“I understand your decision,” I said.
With that, the adrenaline that had kept me on my feet rushed out of me. I was a four-hundred-year-old frost witch. But in that moment, I was an exhausted, nearly naked woman in another person’s bedroom.
My quaking thighs started to give. I stumbled. Isanara was on her feet, pushing hard into my calf for counterbalance. I grabbed for one of the posts at the end of the bed.
Garrick caught me, his huge, warm hand closing around my wrist, his forearm bracing mine, keeping me upright. His thumb and forefinger pressed into the Lifebind.
Sensation tore through my veins, scalding the tender inroads of my body as it surged and searched for my heart.
I ripped my hand away, stumbling backward, hitting the bed, and falling back onto it. I got my arms behind me fast enough to keep from collapsing completely. Any pity or compassion I’d felt was devoured by the icy anger at the reminder. No matter what I chose, Seraxa’s gift bound me to Garrick.
“Do not touch me,” I hissed. “I said I understand you. That is not the same as forgiveness.”
Garrick held the hand that had touched me against his body, as if it had burned. He’d felt the same burst of sensation that I had. As I watched, blinking back the tears that rose with my anger, he rearranged his face into neutrality.
“Take the bed. I will sleep on the floor.”
He did not say anything else as he turned away, and he did not look back again in the minutes that followed. He lay right down on the hearthrug, with all of his clothes on, and the ever-present bow tucked against his chest like a lover.
I was desperate to be rid of my dirty, ragged shift, but I only removed it once I was fully beneath the coverlet and sheets. I crumpled it into a ball and shoved it down toward the foot of the bed. Maybe Garrick would not notice that I was naked in his bed. I told myself I did not care.
I told myself a lot of things as I curled into a ball, Isanara at my back. But I felt it.
The first crack in the ice.