Chapter Fourteen #2
“The circle is broken through,” he said. “Not just cracked. Both rings, the anchor marks, all four of them. The central sigil has split clean in half.”
“He couldn’t get through,” I said.
“No.” He came back into the nest and sat. “Whatever the tower did, or whatever you did, or both, the portal had nothing to connect to. It’s now completely broken and unable to be repaired unless it’s recast.” He looked at me steadily. “He can’t come through the portal anymore.”
Something loosened in my chest and I exhaled shakily. I was safe.
Then immediately tightened again, because Malric’s expression was still grim.
“He knows,” I said.
“Yes.”
“He felt the array go.”
“He would have sensed it the moment the circle cracked. A connection that long, that established—it wouldn’t go quietly.
” He toyed with a dagger that was never far from his hands.
“He’s known something was wrong since at least this evening.
When he couldn’t reach through the portal just now, he knew it wasn’t a malfunction. ”
Thane shifted beside me. “How long before he moves?”
“He was already planning a campaign,” Malric said.
“He has forces assembled. The rebellion has been pushing him toward a final engagement for two months and he’s been positioning for it.
” He sheathed the dagger. “Aveline was his secret weapon. Now he’s lost her, but he doesn’t know who is here, or so we hope.
He may change tactics and come here with his army or stay the course and come with a smaller guard.
Either way, he’s coming for her. For all of us. ”
“How much time do we have?” I asked.
“Days,” Malric said. “The tower is not far from the capital, maybe a week of easy riding. But he’ll ride hard once he can mobilize.”
The words sat heavy in my chest.
“How can we escape? The tower won’t open for any of us. We need a plan.”
Both of them looked at me.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t look at me like I’ve surprised you.
I’ve been in this tower for many years and I know every stone of it.
I know how he thinks and what he values and where he’s afraid, and those things are useful.
” I looked at Malric. “You said you needed a weapon. Start treating me like one.”
Malric held my gaze for a long moment.
Something shifted in his expression. Not softened—sharpened, but differently than before. The way a calculation sharpens when a missing variable finally resolves.
“All right,” he said. “There is only one way for you to be a weapon. You have to bond with an alpha.”
Thane
Idragged Malric to the stairs before he said anything else and I didn’t give him the option of deciding whether to follow. Our pattern had been that I followed where he led, but this was too important to wait. I heard Aveline settle in the nest behind us, but I didn’t look back.
Not yet.
I took him down into the dining room, into the room with the broken circle and the displaced table and the cold residue of whatever her father had tried to push through the walls.
The candles were back but lower than they’d been before, the room not entirely itself yet, and that was appropriate.
Nothing in this tower was entirely itself tonight.
I released his arm and put space between us and paced the room, searching for words for my thoughts.
He waited. Of course he waited. Malric used silence like his sword, and he was adept at both. Right now, he was reading me, cataloging, deciding how he would handle me.
“You were against this,” I said. “Earlier, you couldn’t say what you wanted when she asked you directly.
Two hours ago, you were in the library working out how to keep her at a strategic distance while we figured out what she was.
” I struggled to keep my voice even and calm, so Aveline wouldn’t hear me.
“And now you’ve told her the only option left is to bond with an alpha. ”
“That’s not inaccurate,” he said.
“That’s not what I asked.” I stepped closer.
“How could you do that? She just found out her father has been draining her for most of her life. She’s been sitting in that nest trying to hold herself together, and you walked in there and told her that if she wants to be useful, she has to bond.
” I stopped. “What kind of man does that?”
“The kind who is running out of time,” he said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer that’s true.” He moved to the edge of the broken circle and looked down at it, his back to me.
Not evasion. Malric thought better when he was looking at something that wasn’t a face.
I’d learned that. I knew all of it, every displaced habit and deflection, and right now I wanted to know none of it.
“She deserves better than that,” I said. “After everything she’s already learned, she deserves—”
“I know.” He said it to the cracked stone. “I know she does. But I can’t let her go.”
His voice was stark, bleak, as if he had already given up.
I stood in the cold dining room and looked at his back and waited, because that had been too unexpected.
He turned.
“Let me remind you of what kind of man I am,” he said.
“I watched my mother defy the king and jump to her death, leaving her bonded mate and children behind. I was eleven years old and I watched her die because I wasn’t strong enough to protect her.
I watched my father after. I watched what losing a true mate does to an alpha, watched him come apart in increments over eleven years until there was nothing left that resembled the man he’d been.
” His jaw tightened. “I’ve watched soldiers die on campaigns that were ordered by men who didn’t care if they lived or died.
I’ve watched villages lose their harvests to taxation that served no one.
I’ve been held in a room and hurt in ways I don’t discuss for information I didn’t give, and I kept going because the alternative was that it meant nothing. ”
He stopped. Let that sit.
“There is nothing I would not do to end this,” he said.
“If my death would end it, I would arrange that. I have been ready to arrange that for two years. There is no version of this where I weigh my own comfort against the outcome and choose comfort.” He held my gaze.
“But I would not sacrifice her. And I would not sacrifice you.”
I was still angry. The anger hadn’t gone anywhere. But it had shifted shape around what he was saying, reforming around new information the way it always did when Malric finally said the true thing.
“You told her bonding was her only option,” I said. “That’s—”
“I told her if she wanted to be a weapon, there was one option left.” He moved away from the circle.
“I didn’t tell her she had to. I didn’t tell her she had no choice.
I told her what the path looks like if she chooses it.
” He looked at me steadily. “She told me to treat her like a weapon. She asked for it. I respected that enough to answer honestly.”
“You could have been less blunt.”
“She would have known I was softening it.”
He was right. I hated that he was right. Aveline had spent years being managed through selective information couched as comfort and care, and she was done being handled. Blunt was what she could trust.
“You were against bonding,” I said again, but the accusation had less force behind it now. “You couldn’t answer her when she asked what you wanted.”
“I know.”
“So what changed?”
He was quiet for long enough that I started to think he was going to avoid the question like he often avoided uncomfortable topics. He had done that repeatedly since we’d arrived in this tower and I had stopped expecting him to answer.
Then he crossed the room toward me and I held my ground.
He stopped close, invading my space until all I could smell was Malric—smoke and iron. Closer than the conversation required. His hand came up and gripped the back of my neck, not hard, firm and solid, and he brought his forehead down against mine.
“You were right,” he said quietly. “What you said in the library. I’ve been certain since before I was willing to admit it and I’ve been avoiding it until I can control the outcome.” His grip on my neck tightened fractionally. “I cannot control this outcome. I’ve accepted that.”
I didn’t move. Now that Malric accepted the need to bond with Aveline, was he going to toss me aside, break our bond, and bond with her? He needed an heir for his title and lands. I couldn’t give him an heir, and I was disinherited, a nobody now. Was he replacing me?
“You said she felt like another part of your soul. Like I do.” His voice had dropped to something I only heard when we were alone.
“I’ve been trying not to say that for three days because I know what it means and I know what it costs.
I watched my father pay it and end up as nothing.
” He paused. “She doesn’t feel like an asset or a variable or a weapon.
She feels like the missing thing. The thing I stopped looking for because I had you and you were enough and I told myself that was enough. ”
My throat was tight.
“But it wasn’t enough, was it?” I said. I was bitter and didn’t try to hide it. “She walks in and suddenly you can find the words you’ve never found for me, and I’m supposed to—”
“You are a part of me.” The words were low and even, and landed firmly on my shoulders.
“That doesn’t change. I could never change that and wouldn’t want to.
You’re not a part of my history, Thane, you’re a part of my present and my future.
” His thumb pressed into the base of my skull.
“I’m nothing without you. That’s always been true.
I’ve never said it and I should have. I’m saying it now because you deserve to hear it out loud. ”
I closed my eyes.
The cold of the dining room, the broken circle at our feet, the two flights of stairs between Aveline and us, and whatever happened next—all of it was still there.
None of the practical problems had been resolved.
Her father’s forces were moving, and our time was running out, and the tower was still settling from whatever it had done to repel a portal attack.
None of that had changed.
“She completes us,” he said. “Not replaces. Not supersedes. Completes. The thing we’ve been to each other runs through everything else we are. She doesn’t displace that. She’s the part of it we couldn’t reach without her.”
I opened my eyes.
He was very close, his forehead still against mine, his expression stripped of the artifice he usually maintained between himself and the world.
This was Malric without the wall, which I had seen perhaps a dozen times in three years, and every time it happened, it cost him something and he gave it anyway.
“I need her. The same way I need air and the same way I need you. Not strategically. Not because of what she can do.” He paused. “And I would die before I let anything happen to her.”
I stood with that for a moment, processing.
His voice rang with sincerity and a depth of emotion that I had never heard from Malric.
My own panic calmed in the face of his stoic calm, steadfast and resolute.
We were solid and had room for Aveline. We were finally united in our goal.
Now to figure out how to make it happen in the face of an upcoming battle.
“She might say no,” I said.
I sucked in a breath and nodded. “I know.”
“To either of us. Both of us. She has the right to.”
“Yes.”
“And if she does?”
He lifted his head from mine. His hand stayed at my neck.
“Then we find another way,” he said. “And we protect her anyway. And we don’t make her feel guilty for her decision.”
I looked at him for a long moment. The broken circle caught the candlelight at its cracked edges and threw the light sideways in thin lines across the stone floor.
“You should have said all of this upstairs,” I said.
“I know.”
“You’re going to have to say it to her.”
His jaw tightened. Not in argument. Just bracing for the difficult discussion and vulnerability that he was never good at dealing with. I knew what that cost.
“I will,” he said.
I stepped back. His hand dropped from my neck.
“Then let’s go back up,” I said. “And this time you say the whole truth.”
I turned toward the stairs.
He followed.