Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
MAEVE
When Venay and Pia worked together, they were real life miracle workers. Venay’s enchanted herbs and supplements mixed with the healing magic of the two, made Sebastian look ten times better than he had that morning when we arrived back in Lumosia.
It was nightfall now, and Sebastian was still asleep. I hadn’t left his side since we returned from Draemor. He wasn't able to stay conscious any longer than a few minutes on our ride back, but his eyelids had just begun to flutter, and I knew that he would soon return to full consciousness.
Kohen had woken up the morning after we left, thank the gods.
Having spent my entire day with Seb, I hadn’t seen him yet.
When she came to visit, Pia swore that Kohen didn’t remember a thing about the ritual, which was a relief.
The guilt I felt for putting him through that was brutal on my mind, but knowing we had the journal in our clutch thanks to it brought me some ease.
My thumb rubbed the back of Sebastian’s hand, tracing the outline of a new scar he donned in his tanned flesh.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry it took us so long to get to you.
It should have been me.” My eyes watered, but I stared into a lantern on the wall, using the bright light to keep them dry.
Sebastian began to murmur, his lips parting ever so slightly. I leaned forward, pulling my chair closer to his bedside. “Seb? Can you hear me?”
He blinked a few times before his eyes stayed open, though his eyelids were heavy and struggling. I granted him a smile full of pure release, then dropped my forehead to our hands as the tears began to fall.
He shuffled, releasing a groan of pain as he tried to move his broken body. “Don’t cry,” he said in a sharp whisper.
Typical Sebastian—cheats death and his first words are spent consoling me.
Lifting my head, I wiped my nose. “These are happy tears. I am so relieved that you are here right now.”
He gave me a broken smile. The pain behind his eyes was too much to hide, though he tried.
Taking his arms, I helped him sit up, gently pulling on his shoulders before returning my hands to his. The covers slipped down, revealing his abdomen and the hundreds of scars that now covered it.
“Fuck, Seb.” I chewed the inside of my cheek and ran a finger lightly over the wound I had worked so diligently to heal in the forest. It had been scabbed over when we first found him, but split open again during the bumps of our travels. “What did he do to you?” My voice cracked.
“It doesn’t matter. I'm here, I’m alive.”
Anger blew through me like a tornado. “It matters. He will fucking pay for this,” I hissed.
Sebastian reached his hand up, using a swollen finger to brush a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Damn right, he will.”
A knock hit the door, and we both turned our heads to see Venay lingering in the entryway.
“You're awake.” She sounded surprised as she stepped into the room, approaching Sebastian and looking over his visible injuries. “I have to re-break your ankle. The bone has begun to heal, and if I don’t properly set it, you’ll never walk normally.”
Sebastian threw his head back to the pillow beneath him. “Fucking fantastic,” he muttered.
Venay turned to me. “You should let him rest,” she urged.
“Give us a few minutes,” Sebastian demanded, and when Venay obliged to his request, his beautiful irises—the only part of him not mutilated—settled upon me.
“I can come back later. You heard her, you need to rest,” I advised, wondering if he needed me to say it before he would actually allow it.
“I will rest, but I want to talk to you first.” He scooted backwards, putting his back flush with the headboard, the normally simple process displaying just how much pain he was still in.
“There’s nothing to talk about that can’t wait,” I assured him, setting his hand free at last.
He ignored me, sucking in a few sharp—and no doubt painful—breaths before saying in a low tone, “You shouldn't have come.”
I furrowed my brows. “What?”
“I told Kohen not to let you come. Now Beaumont knows for sure that you are alive.”
“He knew anyway, and of course I was going to come. And good thing we came when we did, Seb. You were already half-dead when Kade got you out of there.”
He groaned as he stretched his neck out, his spine cracking audibly with the motion. “I would have happily died to keep him from knowing that you’re alive.”
My lips met my chin in a frown. “That’s not something I could have lived with. And what's done is done. There's no point in scolding me now, just be grateful that you're here.”
“I’m not scolding you. I just hate that you felt like you needed to risk your life for me,” he answered, sucking in a deep breath as a wave of pain encased him.
“I would risk my life for any of you,” I answered. “Any day. Any time. No matter what.”
He reached out for me, intertwining a finger in a strand of my brown waves. “I have so much to tell you all,” he forced out.
“Once you're better, we can deal with that. I'm sure we have even more to tell you.” I debated telling him that we found his mother’s journal, but decided to hold off. He needed all of his focus to be spent on getting better. And besides, Venay planned to undo her enchantment on it tonight, not that she needed to since Sebastian was back, but he was in no shape to handle that news at the moment and read through the journal’s contents.
So the group wanted to get reading as soon as possible while he recovered.
He nodded once. “Did Leighton make it out? Is she here?”
“The bookkeeper? Yeah, she's here. She's in interrogation with Archer, as we speak. Once Venay proves her honorability, she will be cleared and allowed to stay.”
“Good.” He put his head back again, as if it was too heavy to hold.
The seal of the grief that I had enveloped while he was gone tore open. “Seb, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? For what.”
I fidgeted, rolling the hem of my shirt.
“The last thing I said to you before you left…was horrible to say the least. All I could think about while you were gone was how if you died, that would be the last thing I ever told you.” I turned my neck away to get his broken, but still beautiful, face out of my view.
“Maeve,” he said my name as a breathy whisper that threatened to make me forget everything that had happened between us. “Are we ever going to really talk about it? About us?” he finally asked the question I knew had been eating away at him the whole time he was in that cell.
I sighed. “This isn’t the right time to get into that.”
“You keep saying that. And will the time ever be right? How long are we going to dance around having an actual conversation?”
“I don’t know what else there is to talk about, Seb.” His hand settled on mine as I turned back to him, though I wished I hadn’t, because the hurt in his eyes killed me.
“We can talk about how the entire time I was in Draemor, all I could think about was you and what I would do to earn your trust back when I made it out.”
My eyes widened at the proclamation. “Seb…You have…Earned it back mostly. I just don’t know if I can be with—”
He held a wounded hand up. “Don’t say it. Until you are one-hundred percent sure, don’t say it.”
My lips sealed. He was right. I wasn’t positive that he and I would never be together again, and I needed time to figure that out.
A smile crept upon his bruised, but still chiseled face. “This is the progress I like to hear, though.”
I pursed my lips to fight my own grin. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t let it get to your head.”
The humor faded with his sigh. “I wish you would at least believe that the things I didn’t tell you were because I had your best interest in mind.”
“I do believe you when you say that. I believe that you had my best interest in mind, it just doesn't change the fact that you should have told me anyway.”
“I understand.” He nodded.
“Can I ask you something now?”
“Of course,” he replied with a wince as he shuffled his broken body.
“Why did you feel like you had to baby me? Have I not proven myself to you? Have I not shown that I can handle all of the shit that’s been thrown at me?” Indignation clasped a tight hand around my neck. “Or am I truly as breakable as everyone thinks I am?”
He drew his hand back and crossed his arms over his chest, the pressure squeezing his biceps.
“Gods love—erm…Maeve—no. I was trying to spare you from any additional pain and fear. If I could take your pain from you, I would, so why would I want to be the person who adds to it? It breaks my fucking heart when I have to tell you the hard stuff. If it meant saving you any ounce of agony, I would always rather keep that burden to myself.”
“But I deserve the truth,” I answered under my breath. “I deserved it when we were together, and I deserve it now that we're friends.”
Biting his lip, he looked up at the ceiling. “Friends,” he repeated the word, shaking his head as his eyes drifted into mine and he leaned forward, dipping his lips to the side of my neck. “You can try to deny what we are, but you and I both know that we’re more than just friends.”
My skin pricked up as his words caressed my collar bone. “No,” I forced the word out. “That's all we are now. Friends.”
“I’ll take what I can get.” He smiled, awfully cockily for someone who just got friend-zoned. “Has anyone ever told you that you are incredibly stubborn?”
A subtle laugh escaped me. “You know what, I think I may have been told that once or twice in my life.”
“If you just want to be friends, that's fine with me. But can we agree to put this all behind us?”
“Yes. Of course. I’m sorry it took me so long. I know I tend to hold on to things that I should let go of…that’s just how my brain works. But I'll work on it, I swear.”
“Your brain is perfect. Nothing to work on. And all things considered, I think you took a reasonable amount of time to process everything.”