Chapter 13 #2
“You’re welcome, General.”
Peri shifted, leaning one hip against the stone railing and angling her body toward him. The moonlight caught in her silver hair and turned it nearly luminous. “I assume this conversation is about the emotionally constipated djinn trapped inside a nightmare book with your mate?”
Gerick rubbed a hand over the back of his neck–the cold bit at the strip of skin where his collar had shifted. “Perizada.”
“Nope.” She pointed at him with her mug. “Don’t start acting all stoic and noble with me. I already know exactly what’s bothering you.”
Lucian snorted softly. “We’d expect nothing less.”
“Good.” Peri took a sip without breaking her gaze from Gerick’s face. “It’s one of my many gifts.”
He looked back out over the mountains because it was easier than looking at her. The mist drifted through the trees below like ghosts moving between worlds, and the silence that stretched between the four of them felt heavier than any of the words that had come before it.
“Then tell me I’m wrong,” he said finally.
Peri did not answer immediately.
That silence told him more than he wanted to know.
Lilly’s expression sharpened, gaze flicking between them. “Okay, clearly I missed a chapter somewhere. Somebody explain before my general loses his composure.”
Peri’s breath fogged in the cold and vanished. “Shade and Myanin.”
Lilly blinked once. “Oh.” She grimaced. “Oh, yes. Not exactly the best pair to be stuck in an evil book together.”
Gerick’s stomach tightened.
Peri’s gaze drifted toward the distant peaks as she spoke, and her voice softened in that particular way it only did when she was carrying something too old to set down cleanly.
“They were a disaster long before either of them realized it.” Her silver eyes narrowed slightly.
“Myanin told me about it when we were last here.”
Gerick stayed silent. Something had gone very still in his chest, the kind of stillness that came before a blow.
“She loved him once,” Peri said bluntly. “Or at least the version of him she believed existed.” Her gaze darkened. “And Shade loved her in the most dangerous way possible.”
Lucian frowned. “Meaning?”
“Obsessively,” Peri answered without hesitation.
“He wanted every piece of her attention. Every thought. Every emotion.” She shook her head once, silver hair catching the moonlight.
“And when he couldn’t handle the intensity of what he felt for her, he would pull her close one moment and shove her away the next.
She was younger than him, and he didn’t want to take advantage of that, so that was noble.
But that obsession of his didn’t allow him to cut her loose completely.
It happened over and over, until she didn’t know whether she was being held or discarded half the time. ”
Lilly winced. “That’s very jackass male of him.”
Peri barked a humorless laugh. “Oh, it gets worse. Because the truly irritating part is that underneath all the arrogance and emotional manipulation, he genuinely loved her.”
Gerick hated how much worse that made things.
Cruelty would have been easier. He could name cruelty. He could put a blade through it. But love, especially the wrecked, selfish, half-formed kind Peri was describing, complicated everything. It left roots in a person. It left echoes that did not know how to fade when no one tended them.
“She eventually walked away,” Peri continued more quietly.
“Honestly? It was probably the healthiest decision she’d made in centuries.
Well, sort of.” Her gaze slid back to Gerick, careful now.
“He pushed her into the arms of Thadrick, and we all know how that ended. Then, she met you. You gave her many things I don’t think she’d ever known before.
So maybe, you’re actually the healthiest decision she’s made. ”
The mate bond twisted painfully in his chest, because he knew what Peri was not saying aloud.
You gave her peace. He had given her something steady to hold while her world crumbled.
Everything she’d known had disappeared. She wasn’t even djinn properly anymore, stripped of her magic and stripped of her place.
She did not believe she was worthy of love.
But Gerick had seen it. He had held her when she needed his arms. He had sparred with her when she needed the viciousness of a blade.
And he had sat in silence with her when her own mind grew too loud.
The Great Luna had given her to him.
And now something older than peace was waking up inside her. Something he could not give her.
Lilly leaned her hip against the railing on Lucian’s far side.
The teasing was gone from her yellow eyes now, replaced by something thoughtful.
The glittering steam from her mug curled between her fingers like slow, patient smoke.
“And now they’re trapped inside a magical prison designed to rip emotional truth out of people,” she muttered.
“Fantastic. That’s not concerning at all. ”
“The Nushtonia remembers oaths,” Gerick said quietly. “Promises. Regrets.” His throat tightened. “If it’s forcing them to relive unresolved emotions—”
“Then it’s digging through unfinished love, too,” Peri finished softly.
The words settled over the terrace like a dark cloud.
A draheim roared somewhere far above them, the sound rolling through the mountains, ancient and deep, shivering through the stone beneath their boots before fading into the thin air. None of them flinched. None of them spoke.
Gerick lowered his head and stared down at his hands where they gripped the stone railing. Pale scars crossed the backs of them in thin, deliberate lines, earned over centuries of war and loss and protection. For a long moment, he simply looked at them as if they belonged to someone else.