Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ophelia
My knock was subtle, but I knew he’d be expecting it. Just as I knew he’d be standing on the balcony off his bedroom, glass of dark liquor in hand. It was always like this with us—the predictability. The moving in tandem. The understanding.
“I figured you’d find me when you were ready.” Tol didn’t look at me when he spoke, and I was afraid to face what I would find in his eyes if he had. The setting sun gilded his frame like my own personal Angel.
I crossed the tidy bedroom, notebooks stacked on every surface, and joined him on the balcony. My fingers were twitching. Absently, I traced circles along the stone.
“If I don’t start talking, you’ll likely wear a hole in the railing,” he joked flatly. “Sorry, I don’t have anything to offer for knots.”
Stifling the tension within me, I reached over, lifting his glass from his hands and taking a long sip. I didn’t recognize the liquor, slightly spicy with a hint of orange. It was how I imagined Tolek tasted.
Passing the drink back to him, I folded my hands to stop their fidgeting.
“I’d rather talk,” I said.
“And what is it you’d like to discuss, Alabath?” He slid the glass between his hands, not looking at me. I couldn’t remember a time before the Undertaking when Tol had avoided me. That he did so now made my chest feel like it was going to cave in.
“I’ve already spoken to Malakai.” His shoulders tensed. “What was that, Tolek?”
He took a long sip of his drink, sucking his lips between his teeth, pursing them as he swallowed. “I’m not sure what you mean. He seemed to have an issue with me.”
Who had the issue was irrelevant. Why it had started—that had my heart thumping against my ribs.
I cleared my throat. “And was that issue for good cause?” Even to my ears, it sounded like an accusation. His chin dropped, and I quickly corrected myself. “What I mean to say is, is it true? Because whether or not it is, his grievances don’t justify his actions.”
“Is that what you truly think?”
“I think it’s none of his business,” I confessed, taking a deep breath. “But it is mine. Was he right?”
Slowly, Tol turned his eyes on me, and the look in them was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
It was deeper, a bottomless hole of emotion that I was on the precipice of falling into.
Tol showed more of himself to me than he did to others, shared sides of that scarred soul that he didn’t dare expose elsewhere, but this was more.
“And what does it matter if he is?”
My stomach swooped, my heart with it, because that was as good as a confession.
“How long?” I whispered.
“Since the day I first saw you fight.” He ducked his head.
Bashful—an emotion I never thought I’d see on him.
“Not the play things we did as children, but the first summer we really trained, when we were thirteen. The fire in you, the inability to back down, and the utter glow about you when you did what you were born to do. You were mesmerizing. My young brain became obsessed. Spirits, I think I noticed it earlier than that, but I didn’t understand it then. ”
The fact that he’d been captured by those things about me and held on to them for all these years caught my breath in my throat. But—
“That was the summer…”
I didn’t have to finish the sentence. He knew as well as I did that summer was when Malakai and I first confessed our feelings for each other.
“That was when I decided I would never tell you.” He finished his drink, setting the glass aside. “If the feelings never subsided, I decided then that I would keep them to myself as long as I lived.”
“Tol…”
“I don’t want pity, Ophelia.” He looked at me, eyes hard.
“I’m not pitying you.” Maybe I was pitying myself for never knowing, for never seeing. “The feelings never subsided.”
“What do you want me to say?” He turned toward me, hand pressing to his chest. “Do you want me to say that I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember?
That I woke every day aware you were his and accepted it because you loved him and that was enough for me.
Being your friend, walking through life with you, even if in a different sense than I hoped…
it was enough. Is that what you want me to admit?
That I was allowed to make you laugh, share in those brightest moments, and feel the light you spread to the world.
And when that light needed rekindling, I would do that, too.
Because if that’s what you want to hear, then I’ll say it.
I’ll tell you every hidden truth darkening my heart if it’s what you want—it belongs to you anyway. ”
He clutched the railing, knuckles turning white, and that grip tightened around my heart. It had been him holding it together all these years.
His love was the glue between my broken glass. The fire forging me anew. And I’d never stopped to realize.
“I want the truth, Tol. I want to know why you never told me. When Malakai was gone, you still didn’t tell me.”
“How could I?” His brows pulled together, but he ran a hand over his face, collecting his thoughts.
“You were so hurt, so broken. I watched you fall into that dark space, and I swore I would help you climb back out of it however you’d allow me to.
But I also swore I would do nothing to hurt you any more than you’d already suffered. ”
It was instinct to step toward him, but I stopped myself from unlatching his fingers on the railing. Spirits, I wanted to. I wanted to unburden all of these heavy truths from his heart.
“How could you have hurt me?” I asked instead.
His face nearly crumpled. “If I had told you, it only would have ended one way.” When he saw the confused tilt of my head, he continued, “You were so in love with him still, carrying that spark of hope that he would come back to you. If I had told you what was in my heart, you would have rejected me. And I know you—it would have hurt you to do that to me.”
A selfless decision, caring only about the pain that rejection would inflict on me. I didn’t deny that I would have done it. I’d been so desperate for Malakai, I likely wouldn’t have looked at anyone else.
Still, I wished Tol hadn’t been so selfless.
“You were never going to tell me?”
“If I could have gotten you over what happened, as nothing more than a friend, I never would have told you.” He read the secret-burned scars that made me flinch.
“I know that takes away your decision in the matter, and for that I apologize, but I wasn’t willing to be the cause of any more damage to your heart. ”
“And what about your heart?” He’d always been pushed to the side, so much so that he now chose it for himself, sacrificing to put me first.
“What about it?” He shrugged.
My blood heated at the casual dismissal. “Tolek Vincienzo, your heart matters as much as anyone else’s.”
To me, it mattered more than most. It always had—and I was only starting to consider what that might mean.
“But you needed a friend when Malakai was gone. You didn’t need…whatever I might be. And once he was back…”
Understanding tapped at the confusion in my mind. “You tried to keep your distance?”
It was why I hardly saw him in those first weeks after the Undertaking. Why he’d seemed to disappear until I needed him most, always attune to those moments like an instinct forced him back to me.
He’d tried to give me the space to heal with Malakai.
“I thought it would help you two if I didn’t complicate things further—I tried, I did. But, Spirits damn me, you’re hard to stay away from, Alabath.” He shook his head, and with each confession, tension melted from his shoulders. The hollows I’d formed at his distance filled.
Tol finally unlatched his fingers from the banister. “I never needed you to love me, Ophelia. Not in the way I love you.” One step toward me. “Did I want you to? Of course. More than I wanted to live.” Another slow step. “But I never needed it.” A third, and he stopped, inches away.
My heart pounded, the Bind inked on my arm pulsing with each beat.
“What I needed was for you to love. To allow yourself to be loved. To save the girl I fell in love with from succumbing to that brutal darkness so she could grow into the woman—the warrior—she was meant to be. And if you never loved me, but the rest was true, I would’ve been okay.
I would’ve been happy to be by your side in whatever capacity you needed. ”
I had loved Malakai—I would always hold love for him. The piece of my heart that had been torn from my chest, warped, and put back together would always carry an echo of the young love that fate had torn apart.
I had thought it all belonged to me now, but I was wrong.
There was another piece, stronger and yet to be shredded, that belonged to Tol.
To the friend who was my moonlight on a dark night.
Who held me in my bleakest moments and waited for me to come back to myself.
Who not only saw my rough edges and loved each one but also found the soft sides hidden beneath.
We had told each other as much before I completed the Undertaking.
You carry a piece of my heart.
And you, mine.
I hadn’t understood the gravity of those words at the time. What he truly meant. Even now, with Tol laying his heart bare before me, I still didn’t know what my heart wanted.
But awareness was stirring inside me—a beast that wanted that happiness Tol spoke of. An instinct that might know how to find it if I could fight my way past the pain I’d suffered so far, avoiding any more slices from the shattered pieces of myself.
“I don’t know what capacity I can offer yet,” I whispered, hating myself for not having a suitable answer for him.
He released a low laugh, his breath fanning across my skin. “I’m not asking you to know. I’m asking nothing of you.”
He meant it, too. If I wished, he would bury this day beneath the mountains and let the beautiful friendship we had built over the past twenty years bloom on its grave. Because Tolek Vincienzo would never ask anything that I could not give.
“I leave tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be back in three weeks.”
His piece of my heart cried out at the fact that he was leaving so soon after I’d learned his truth, but perhaps it was good. I needed time to be alone, to nurse my own wounds, repair my own heart. To figure out what it wanted.
“Maybe that time will help me—figure this out.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t have to.”
Yes, it did. He deserved an answer. The fact that he didn’t ask for one only made me want to find it more.
“Take this.” I unclipped my grandmother’s pin from my leathers. “For when you go. So I’ll be with you.”
The sun slipped behind the mountains, stars popping into the violet sky and the world falling into serenity. As if nature itself had been waiting for Tolek to reveal his secret and was finding some peace in the truth. Tenderly, he wrapped his fingers around the pin.
“I’ll see you in three weeks’ time, Alabath.” Tolek kissed my cheek, the brush there and gone as quickly as a hummingbird’s wing, but my breath caught in my throat.
“I’ll see you then, Vincienzo.”
I backed away, not once breaking eye contact with him as he clipped my pin onto the left breast of his leathers. I could no longer avoid the depth in his stare that begged me to fall over the edge into it.
If I chose to, I knew he’d catch me. Tol would remain my tether if I allowed him to.
I watched him leave the next morning.
He tried to sneak out before the sun rose, but I hadn’t slept. Hoods drawn, weapons secured, four figures marched out of the palace grounds on horseback.
From my balcony, crisp twilight air winding its way around my bare feet and lifting my silk robe, I tracked the figure in the front.
My eyes stung, but I told myself it would be okay. I’d see him soon.