Chapter 14 Xeni #2
“Eat,” Bash insists quietly.
I force down another bite.
“You said you were attacked?” he prompts.
I nod, replaying the events in my head. “We were ambushed by the military. I took a bad hit and was unconscious when it actually happened, but Nyx drew on his power to protect us, and once we dealt with the threat, we joined the others before heading back to the village. Ronan—”
I pause at Bash’s raised brow.
“He’s an Anunian deserter, mated, usually a pain in my ass… but he’s loyal. He found a leaf at the rift site after Nyx used his power.”
“A leaf?” he asks, nose wrinkled.
“From the other side.”
Bash’s sharp inhale almost makes me smile. Despite the tragedy of what was happening at Ljómur, he always lit up over his experiments. He spent years trying to force reactions from the rifts and never got to see any results from his hard work.
“How?” he asks.
“We’re not entirely sure,” I say with a small shrug. “It took an enormous amount of power… too much for him to risk trying it a second time. Later, when we discussed it, Sprocket mentioned your name, and… here I am.”
“So you’re here to ask for my help.”
“Basically,” I mutter.
He scoffs as his guard builds again, his feet moving in that same agitated circuit back and forth. “And what did your friends say about sending you to proposition your rejected mate?”
“Don’t say it like that,” I plead.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know the whole story.”
“I don’t know the whole story?” he repeats, his anger building as his fists ball at his sides.
“I don’t know any of the story, Xenesis.
All I know is one moment I was in your arms, and the next they were dragging me away while you sat there and watched.
You watched! I fought an entire squadron trying to get back to you, and you didn’t even care! ”
“I had to—”
“You broke me!” he shouts.
My gaze drops to the floor, my vision blurred with the tears that burn behind my eye. The air is stifling with his anger as he drags in ragged breaths, pacing until he finally stops and faces me again.
“Why were you running from those guards?” he asks, voice clinical once again.
I swipe at my eye in an attempt to steady myself. “When I arrived, someone directed me to a pub where the owner was… sympathetic to deserters. He let me stay while I searched for you.”
“Leif?” he guesses.
“You know him?” I ask, glancing up.
Bash tilts his head in a conceding nod. “We run in the same circles. I’ve never met him, but I know who he is.”
“He had a friend who claimed to have information about you, but he wanted a favor first.”
“Who was this friend?” Bash asks.
“Gideon,” I say, and Bash exchanges a glance with Cato at the door.
“My older brother,” Cato explains.
“Real pleasant guy. The family resemblance is uncanny,” I say with a tone loaded with sarcasm. “Those schedules I was carrying when you caught me were for him.”
Cato glares at me, but eventually, curiosity wins. “What did he want them for?”
“They were monitoring shipments. He wouldn’t give me details, but they were counting on something big coming in this week.”
“We’ll get the information to him,” Bash tells Cato, who nods. When his focus returns to me, the anger has faded into concern.
“What happened at the office?" he asks. "Did someone recognize you? Does anyone know you’re alive?”
“No, that was… unrelated. One of the workers there had been at the gate when I entered, and I kind of… flirted with his boyfriend to distract from the fake ID.”
“Of course you did,” Bash mutters.
“It was just to get through.”
“It isn’t my business who you fuck, Xenesis.”
“Stop calling me that,” I say as I hold his eyes. “No one mentioned fucking until you did.”
His satisfaction falters as he purses his lips once more, chewing on the inside of his cheek.
“Finish your story,” he says.
I lift my shoulder in a shrug. “Not much left to tell. The boyfriend looked me up afterward, realized the ID was fake, and called it in. By the time I figured out he had reported me, I had to run, and I barely made it out before backup arrived. Your… friends found me, and here we are.”
“What did you expect?” Bash asks. “You came looking for me after breaking my heart. What did you think was going to happen?”
“I thought…” My voice weakens, and I swallow past my nerves. “I thought you might hear the story and want to continue your research. It’s what you spent all those years studying in theory, but now it’s real. It’s tangible, and we could figure it out… you could figure it out, and I thought…”
“Thought what?” he presses.
I stare unseeing at the tray as I shake my head. “That you might be willing to hear my side.”
“Your side?” he asks, his voice climbing.
My gaze moves up to his, hating the fury I find there.
“Gods you are just so fucking arrogant, aren’t you?!” Bash shouts as he loses control of his temper, and his face flushes dark. “There are no sides, Xeni. There were never any sides. There was you and me, and that was it. That was my side. That was my forever, and I thought it was yours, too.”
“I was… I am…”
“You left me!”
Shame and mourning close my throat, and I shake my head, desperate for him to see my truth. “I understand you’re angry—” I say, and it comes out pleading. His eyes bore into mine, and I know it was the wrong thing to say.
“Angry? You think I’m fucking angry?”
“Aren’t you?” I counter.
“I’m not angry, I’m hurt!” The raw fracture in his tone slices through me, and my first tear slips free, tracing a path down my cheek.
“I am devastated,” he continues, the confession torn from him, “and I have never been the same since that morning. I am done, Xeni!”
He charges forward, fisting my shirt and bunching the fabric until it strains. For the first time since I met him, I believe he might abandon logic for fists. That his fury might unleash in blows instead of words.
I wish he would.
The thought rises unbidden… that I deserve whatever comes next.
That I want it.
I’ve earned every ounce of pain he needs to inflict to balance the scales. Let him strike me, throw me to the ground, take from my flesh what I stole from his heart.
Anything to ease the grief that’s changed him in ways time alone never could.
“I can take it,” I whisper in a pitiful, fragile offering. “Whatever you need to do to me. Do it. Please.”
His eyes are wild with hurt and fury and something older. Grief that never healed, and has only grown in the years of silence.
For a long, suspended heartbeat he just stares, chest heaving in ragged pulls. His fingers stay twisted in my shirt like he’s clinging to the last thread of us, afraid to let go even as he wants to tear it apart.
Then, slowly, agonizingly, his hands unclench.
He doesn’t step back right away. He stays close enough that I feel the heat radiating from him, the faint tremor in his frame, and catch the ghost of his familiar scent beneath the city dust and sweat.
His throat works in a hard swallow, the muscle jumping as he fights for control, and when he finally speaks, his voice is scraped raw.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, and it sounds like the confession costs him. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
The words land heavier than any blow could have.
“We’ll take the information to Gideon,” he continues, voice steadying into something cold and final, “then get you out of the city. Where you go after that doesn’t matter.”
“Bash, no,” I beg, clutching his arm with desperate fingers, and for a fleeting moment he lets me hold on, his muscles rigid beneath my grip. “Please, just listen.”
“Don’t look at me like I’m the villain,” he says, voice cold. “You did this. I would’ve died for us, but you threw me away.”
“Please,” I whisper.
He shoves me back and storms out of the room, leaving Cato to glare at me again before he follows Bash out. The lock clicks behind them like a final heartbeat.
My chest has never felt quite so hollow.
I try to shout, to scream my frustrations to anyone who’s willing to listen, but it comes out as a wail. I stumble my way into the bathroom, groping in the dark to find the only thing that gives me any relief.
Pain breaks through my madness in a cruel mercy, and as the razor falls to the ground with a clatter, all I can do is sob.