Ten #4
“—I need you to run,” I continued. “Get away before you’re hurt too badly to escape, and don’t worry about me the way I know you’ll want to. I can recover from any damage they do. I’ll heal. You won’t.”
He groaned, his frustration audible. “I thought we were beyond this, little fish.”
“We’re beyond me asking you to leave me to die. Now I’m asking you to leave me behind because we both know that I won’t,” I said. “You might. Miranda needs us both, and she only gets that if you don’t stay and fight for me when you know we’re not going to win.”
“Why are you asking me this now? Everything may be fine once we reach the keep,” he said sourly. “It may be nothing we can’t handle.”
“But it may also be bad, and if we don’t talk about this before it gets bad, we wind up trying to figure things out on the fly.
We both know that never works out the way we think it will.
” I shook my head. “I am not planning to take any unreasonable risks. If nothing else, I like this dress. I am planning to go in, find Raysel, and get out. But if this turns into a fight, I need to know that you’re safe, or I won’t be able to focus on protecting myself, or her.
So please. If it looks like things aren’t going to go our way, you need to run. ”
Tybalt sighed heavily, the sound seeming to travel all the way up from his toes. “This is a strange time to learn maturity, little fish. I could have done very well without it.”
“Yeah, well, I was going to have to get there eventually,” I said. “Might as well be when we’re sauntering into mortal peril.”
The moor had swallowed us whole by that point: the wood was as far behind us as the keep was ahead. Our conversation was bracketed by two locations, and our time to talk freely was coming steadily to an end.
“Yes, October. For you, for our child, I will run if the need arises. I will leave you to fight on alone, and I will go. But I will come back.”
“I don’t doubt that in the least,” I said. “You always come back for me, no matter how bad things get. I know it.”
“And if you make me leave you, I will remind you of it daily for the next year,” he said. “You will have to soothe me to sleep in the morning, for this is a cruelty such as you have very rarely forced upon me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sweetheart, I understand,” I said, barely managing not to laugh.
He sounded serious enough that it wouldn’t have been received well.
What I was asking made perfect sense: I could recover from just about any wound, including several that I was told on good authority had been fatal.
I could get back up again after I was knocked down, and I would be able to get better.
He wouldn’t. Much as I adored him, he healed like anyone else did, and the thought of seeing him die again made my chest hurt.
Yes, “again.” Tybalt was a King of Cats, and that came with some benefits, including a certain number of extra lives—times when he could die and come back again, either on his own or because someone else was willing to intervene.
He’d died at least once in my presence, and he wasn’t sure how many lives he had left to go.
Call me old-fashioned, but I wanted to have a little more time together before I had to figure out how to be a widow.
A century or two to start with. Anything less than that would be too cruel.
We had almost reached the keep. We slowed, and I reluctantly pulled my hand out of his. He responded by grabbing my wrist and tugging me sharply toward him. I collided with his chest, my candle pinned between us, and could only blink bemusedly up at him before he ducked his head and kissed me.
I was never going to get used to the fact that I lived in a world where I was just allowed to kiss him now, where we could do this any time we wanted, without needing to come up with excuses for our behavior or put on a show for hostile monarchs who might happen to be watching us.
From the way he kissed me, he wasn’t used to it either.
He kissed me like he was a forest fire and I was the last tree standing, like he needed to consume me or be extinguished.
And after that brief moment of surprise, I kissed him back just as fiercely.
In that embrace, it was easy to forget that we might be being watched.
If part of me still remembered, it was the part of me that was more than happy to let them watch.
We could put on a show, for all I cared.
This entire situation was their fault—well, Luna’s fault, really—and if they didn’t want to watch me reassure my husband that I still loved him enough to fight and stay alive for him, they shouldn’t have started all this in the first place.
Finally, reluctantly, he let me go and stepped away. I pressed my knuckles against my lips, smothering my smile, while he merely looked pleased with himself.
“Well,” he said. “Shall we go and remind the young Miss Torquill that she’s still expected to do her chores?”
“Let’s,” I said, and together, we approached the keep.