Chapter 10 #2
And there, in the vision, stood another version of himself, watching her from the far edge of the white space.
Hands at his sides. Too late. Either too early or too late.
It seemed like he couldn’t get the timing right for them, and yet he still knew she was the one for him. He’d stake his life on it.
The vision snapped away.
The silence after it had a charged, electric quality, the kind that rose along the back of his neck and settled at the base of his skull.
Myanin swallowed. He watched her throat work with the motion.
“That’s not real,” she said.
“No,” he agreed quietly.
“It’s manipulation.”
“Yes. But not mine,” he assured her.
She turned to him fully, her eyes lifting to his, and the careful armor she’d been holding around herself thinned visibly at the edges.
“Then why does it feel like it matters?”
That was the crack.
He stepped into it before she could pull it closed again.
He moved cleanly, the way he moved when there was something on the line, closing the distance between them in one smooth, unhurried stride.
Close enough that he heard her breath hitch.
Close enough that her body answered him before her mind had time to assemble its objections.
He lifted his hand. Slow and deliberate. He moved as if he meant to touch her face, his palm rising along the line of her jaw, his fingers curving in a shape they already knew by heart, but he stopped an inch from her skin.
He could feel the warmth of her against his fingertips.
He could see the small flutter of pulse in her throat.
He held his hand exactly where it was, because the choice to close that final inch belonged to her, and he had spent centuries learning the bitter difference between wanting and being welcome.
“You want the truth?” he asked, and let his voice drop low enough that she had to feel as much as hear it.
Her chin came up. Always defiant. He loved her for it. He had always loved her for it.
“Do I ever not?”
His mouth curved despite him, and he knew that smile too well to pretend he didn’t. He had worn it on the worst day of his life and the best, and she’d been the cause of both.
“Fair.”
He leaned in just enough that his next words found her at the soft place under her ear.
“That oath wasn’t about claiming you.”
Her brows drew together. “Then what?”
“It was about not losing you without a fight. Because you’re worth fighting for.”
He saw his words move through her face in stages, the way real things settled when they finally found their target, and he felt it move through the bond that had always been between them, at the same time, a low, ringing note he had not heard from her in longer than he could measure.
Something in her steadied at the words. Something else came undone.
He could not have said which one of the two cost her more.
“You pushed me away. And then I chose to walk away,” she said, more quietly now.
“I know.” It hurt to admit those words. But he’d been wrong all those decades and decades ago. He shouldn’t have pushed or pulled. He should have given her time and room to grow. He should have encouraged her and cheered her on as she blossomed into the warrior and woman she’d become.
“And you’re saying you would have, what, stopped me?”
“Yes and no,” he admitted. “I would have not given you a reason to walk away in the first place.”
He gave it to her without hesitation. He gave it to her without apology. He had owed her that answer for centuries, and there was nothing in him left that wanted to dress it up.
Her breath caught. “Regardless, that’s not your choice to make.”
“No,” he agreed.
He let the silence sit for a beat. He let her hear the next part before he spoke it. “But it was mine to try. Instead, I destroyed what was between us. I hurt you. And then I blamed you for my pain.”
The space between them tightened. Not physically.
He could not have closed it any further than he already had, not without permission.
What tightened was something deeper, the thread that ran from his chest to hers and had run there since the first time she had ever turned and looked at him over her shoulder with a sharp word on her tongue and a worse one waiting behind it.
The kind of tension that didn’t come from conflict. The kind that came from being seen.
“You don’t get to show up centuries later and act like this still matters,” she muttered.
“And you don’t get to pretend it doesn’t,” he answered evenly.
Her eyes flashed up to his, dark and bright at once. “Of course, you’d say that.”
A beat of silence. He let it fill.
“Why now?” she asked.
He felt the question settle in him with more weight than he expected.
It was the same question he’d been asking himself.
He held her gaze. He let his hand drift the smallest fraction closer to her cheek, his thumb hovering near the corner of her jaw without touching, and he gave her the only honest answer he had left.
“Because for the first time,” he said quietly, “you’re ready to listen.”
Her breath hitched.
For a second, only a second, she didn’t deny it.
He watched something move behind her eyes then that he hadn’t put there.
Another face surfaced in her expression, the steady, patient kind of presence that anchored her in a way he had never been allowed to.
He felt the flicker of it across the bond before she shut it down, and he felt the sharp, twisting heat of her guilt chase it.
She hated it. He could see her hating it.
Her jaw worked once and her eyes dropped from his for the first time since the vision had snapped away.
He knew her enough to know she hated this moment for existing. She hated him for being the cause of it. She hated, most of all, that she had not stepped back.
He was not going to apologize for any of it. Not this time.
“You’re not making this easier,” she said. Her voice came out lower, rougher around the edges.
Shade shrugged. “I’m not trying to.” He’d decided there was no point in not being honest with her. If he had any hope of being what she needed, then he had to swallow his pride and be what she needed. Not what he thought she wanted.
She scoffed. “Of course, you’re not.” But still she did not move.
He watched her not move. He watched her hand stay at her elbow. He watched her weight stay where it was and her breath come a fraction shallower than it had been a minute before, and he held his own hand exactly where it had been, an inch from her skin, an inch from the rest of his life.
Neither of them moved.
The Nushtonia hummed around them, satisfied for now, and the silence between them held the shape of a question that neither of them was ready to answer out loud.