Chapter 33 #2
She had thought herself prepared for his anger. Not this. It took effort to make her mouth work. “Eamon killed him. Not me.” The sentence came out flat and bare, the way ugly truths had to be spoken if one meant to survive them. “Because of the Fuil-Chroí.”
Suddenly, heat unfurled through the room in slow, invisible waves, the air close and oppressive, pressing against her skin like the warning breath of an oncoming storm. The light at the window had gone oddly still. Even the curtains seemed to hang with more weight to them.
“What do you mean?”
Elara kept her hands flat against her thighs to stop them from curling.
“He said it pulls at him. That it clouds his thinking where I’m concerned—that he can’t always separate his own mind from it.
” The steadiness in her voice surprised her, given how her skin was crawling.
“Why didn’t you tell me that it was—that he could—”
“I didn’t know.” Reynnar had gone the color of cold ash. “I have never heard of a life debt behaving that way.” His throat worked. “And he said nothing to me.”
“The youngling— It was an accident.”
“An accident I had to bury.”
The words seemed to hang there, ugly and unfinished.
Her throat felt like it was closing. “After carrying you back from the Veil, Caelion and I followed your path to the tower and found what you left behind. We buried that youngling and wiped the blood from the stones so the Concord would not come baying at our heels. His parents will never know what became of him.”
Elara’s eyes slid shut. It was cowardice, perhaps, but she could not bear to watch the grief gather in his face, could not endure the sight of her own shame reflected in his gaze. It was already within her—a sore that had made a home of every hidden place.
“You went chasing ghosts,” he said, “and forgot the living. You put curiosity before caution, before trust.”
Heat flashed through her so fast it left her dizzy.
She flung the blanket aside and stood. “And Eamon?” she demanded, voice breaking.
“Did he lose your trust as well? Or is this judgment reserved for me? He does this all the time, doesn’t he?
That’s what you said. You expect it from him.
You tolerate it. But I do it once, and suddenly it’s—what? Unforgivable?”
Reynnar crossed the space between them before she could retreat.
His hand rose to her cheek and brushed the tear from her cheek with a gentleness so at odds with the rest of him.
The conflict was there in the touch. Exasperation still burned in him.
Hurt, too. Yet both bowed before the need to soothe what he had wounded.
“Don’t mistake my tolerance of Eamon for forgiveness,” he sighed. “I have had this same quarrel with him more times than I care to count. He is my friend. He is also a Sídhe I learned long ago not to rely on. This is not the same.”
“Why?”
He looked at her as if memorizing something he was about to lose.
“Because you are not merely my friend, Eilíara.” His fingers brushed the line of her throat, paused there like a question, then slid to the back of her neck and drew her in until their foreheads touched.
“You will never be only that,” he murmured. “Mo chuisle.”
My pulse.
A deep, bruising tenderness tore through her. She stood helplessly in it. Her eyes closed of their own accord, hiding behind the dark. There was nowhere left in the light to stand that didn’t burn. Not this close to him.
“I owe you an apology,” he rasped. “I didn’t hear you out.
I dug my heels in and shut the door before you’d finished speaking.
I have no claim over your choices. I never sought one.
You have been bound often enough without my adding my hand to it.
” He leaned into the touch of her brow. “But you didn’t come to me.
You didn’t fight with me, didn’t tell me I was wrong and force me to hear it.
You just—left. And I have to ask myself what I did to make you feel like you couldn’t. ”
He let out a slow breath. “I will argue with you,” he said. “That much I can promise. We’ll go at it until we’ve ground the disagreement down to something neither of us hates. But I will not shut you out again.” His voice lowered, roughening. “And I am asking you not to shut me out either.”
His grip loosened slightly, fingers sliding into her hair as though he couldn’t decide whether to hold on or let go.
“I know what it is to have your choices handed back to you in pieces and be expected to be grateful for the scraps. I’m not asking you to hand them over again.
I’m asking you to stop carrying everything alone as though there’s no one standing beside you.
” His gaze held hers. “I am beside you, Eilíara. In whatever you choose. Whatever it costs. But I cannot stand with you if you do not tell me where you mean to go.”
Elara blinked, and another voice rose in her memory—another argument, another man looking at her as if her self-destruction were some personal betrayal.
But where Ivan had given her anger—hard and glacial, each word striking like flint—Reynnar gave her this instead.
No less devastating for its gentleness. No easier to endure.
She did not know which was worse: to be accused outright or to be handled with such care that it stripped every defense from her. One made her want to fight. The other left nothing in her that could.
Reynnar stepped back, and she let him.
By the time she opened her eyes again, he was already at the door. His back was to her, his shoulders squared, the whole of him gathered into control. Only the hand on the latch betrayed him. His fingers tightened once, then loosened.
“Do I have your trust?”
Her breath snagged; the hearthlight trembled. “Always.” Her throat tightened around the word. “Unequivocally.”
Every careful wall she had built—the rational arguments, the measured distances, the long and exhausting work of convincing herself that what she felt could not be authentic—collapsed inward all at once. What remained was something so plain and so obvious she almost laughed.
She trusted him.
Not the Cara.
Him.
Since the very first day she had known him.
She had spent months insisting it was not real: that the bond and the man could not be untangled, that her feelings were too compromised to trust, and his perhaps no less so. The Cara had its fingers in all of it. She would be a fool to forget that.
But he had never once given her a reason to think so.
The trust had been sitting underneath the argument the entire time, patient and unmoved, waiting for her to exhaust herself long enough to find it.
And she knew right then and there that she did not want to do this alone.
Not because she feared what she would be on her own, but because he had become—without her ever meaning for him to—the person she turned toward.
In the dark. In the difficult. In all the places where she had spent her whole life turning only toward herself.
That was not the Cara.
That was the most honest thing she had ever known.
A small shift passed through him, subtle as breath.
“And you have mine,” he said softly. “Unequivocally, ealaín. I can weather your anger. Your doubts—I will meet every one. But your absence—” He let go of the frame.
“I have spent months keeping myself at arm’s length from you.
Keeping guard of what remains of my sense.
” He pressed a fist to his chest and let out a rough breath. “I fail at both.”
He took a step back into the room, then stopped himself. Breathed out.
“I have been trying to be reasonable about what you are to me and what I cannot ask of you. And then you were gone and every reasonable thing I had told myself went with you.” He shook his head.
“There is no right thing where you are concerned, Eilíara. There is only this.” His eyes found hers.
“And I am no longer willing to pretend there isn’t. ”
The latch caught. The hearthlight flickered once and stilled.
Elara pressed her fingers to her mouth and stood there with the ache of him still warm in the room and another ache—older and no less living—rising to meet it.