Chapter 55 #2
Unease roiled within Audra. She chewed on the inside of her lip.
Maybe she should say it, even though it might hurt him to hear it.
She had to; she owed him that much. And if she’d learned anything over the past two days …
it was that she needed to stop keeping things to herself.
She’d wasted so much time not telling her friends the truth, not revealing her true worries, thoughts, feelings, and in the end it hadn’t protected her or them—they would have been blindsided, unable to protect themselves against whatever will happen when the six dead priestesses are discovered.
She feared for them, hoped they wouldn’t be questioned or harmed because of her transgressions.
She squared her shoulders. “Zhaire …” She wet her lips. “By going with you, I am not accepting my place in your prophecy just yet.” A thick swallow. “I still need time … time to decide my own fate.”
An understanding now. “That’s alright, you need not decide just yet.”
Audra raised her chin, staring him down, but the beginning of hope was stirring within her now. Hope that she wouldn’t have to fight him just now—wouldn’t be forced into something she wasn’t ready for. “It will be my choice, yes?”
His low-lidded gaze was heavy upon hers, his voice low, solemn. “You have a choice, Heiress; with me, you will always have a choice.”
Audra sighed in relief. She believed him. She couldn’t say exactly why; since that day in Fernwell Inn, there had been so many lies and betrayals, but for now she believed he would give her a choice, and that would have to be enough. “Alright, I’m ready. Take me to the Veiled Realm.”
Zhaire’s gaze followed her as she moved until she stood beside the Veilway, but he took no steps with her. Audra frowned, turning back toward him. “What am I missing? I thought this was what you wanted.”
“It was. It is. But I have a confession of my own … One I must share with you before you make the choice to come with me.”
She stilled. “Go on.”
“I must warn you.” That dark look again, anger and something else, something she couldn’t place, flashing in his ink-dark eyes. “I was never meant to be your counterpart. That was my brother’s honor.”
“Your brother’s? Then how …”
“We lost him a little over two months ago.”
Pain and grief and guilt. That was what she couldn’t place. He was racked with it.
Two months … it must have happened days before she would have arrived in Zenaida. “It must be terrible to lose a brother.”
She thought of Emyre. He was lost to her now—but she knew in her heart that he lived—and thus the pain was achy and sharp—but it did not consume like the grief of losing a loved one to the finality of death.
He swallowed hard, the sound loud in the quiet wood. “The only one to take his place was a bastard second born never intended for such responsibility.”
She kept her gaze level, her features still. “You.”
“Me. The worst thing that could have happened for you.”
She remained quiet, though her heartbeat quickened.
“When I found out you had arrived in the Zenaidan realm, I was grieving my brother and … I was drunk and rash and stupid.” He pressed his thumbs to his eyes for a moment, grounding himself.
“I convinced my father, King Andreh, that I could never replace Kiel, that I would fail … and that … our only option was to take your life before the Zenaidans could use it against us.”
Audra’s breath hitched. “I see.”
“But that was before I knew you, before I had even really seen you. Before …” His voice trailed off, but she heard what was said in the silence.
Before they’d talked and laughed and gotten to know each other, in the small parts they allowed each other to share. To see and be seen.
Before they’d kissed.
But she’d known some of this before … “You warned me about this already, you warned me that in an effort to stop the Zenaidans from using me, that you would take my life.”
“Yes, but that was before, when it would have been my choice.” A heavy sigh. “When I threatened you before, I hadn’t truly known it then … but it had been nothing but a bluff.”
Dread pooled in her belly. “And now?”
“That last night we dreamed together … My father had issued the order. He must have known, been warned by his seers or his gut; however, it doesn’t matter—he knew that you would be discovered the following day.” A rush of breath. “I was supposed to kill you yesterday morning.”
“He issued the order for my death?” So, it had gone from a warning to reality. The Veridian Realm and the Veiled Realm had both ordered her death.
Then a rather absurd thought flitted through her mind like an errant bird, breaking free from its flock.
“Wait … yester …?” A gasp. “You were in my room yesterday!” She’d suspected she’d seen him, a shadow in the corner—but then she’d realized that she was late for class.
Then she was captured, locked in a prison, tided, gagged, transported, and almost murdered by religious zealots.
After all that, she’d forgotten the Zhaire-shaped shadow in the corner of her dorm room.
Had he come to kill her?
Had he planned to end her life?
“I was there, but not physically,” he whispered.
“Not physically … so not to kill me …”
“No, of course not.”
“Then, why? Just to, what? Watch me sleep?” She almost laughed at the comicality of this entire ordeal. “Well, that’s still unsettling, Zhaire.”
“Not so unsettling,” he said, his gaze heating, “considering what had passed between us just moments before.”
The memory hit her again, of the dream that was not a dream. The vitality of his emotions—his desire for her. The heat. His mouth. The need.
But … “Why the delay now, then? Have you changed your mind?” Hoarfrost crept into her voice. “Did you answer my call not as my savior, but as my end?” she echoed the words he’d first spoken to her.
He had warned her, the first time they’d spoken.