6. Luka
Luka
I let her walk ahead with Azaan because she needs someone who’ll make her laugh, and because if I stay next to her right now I’ll do something stupid, like carry her the whole way to the Palace so nothing can touch her again.
My panther paces under my skin, restless, snarling.
Mate. The bond runs hot and raw through me, and it has since the moment that shadow snatched her off the road and I couldn’t reach her.
There’s a madness in a mate bond that no one warns you about.
I’d have walked into that lair knowing it would kill me. I nearly did.
Valerian falls into step beside me. He’s good at that, appearing at your shoulder when you’d rather be alone.
“You’re brooding,” he says.
“I’m allowed.”
“You’re allowed. You’re also loud about it, and she’ll feel it through the bond if you don’t rein it in. She’s carrying enough.”
He’s right, and I hate when he’s right, which is most of the time. I breathe out slow and pull the panther back down to a simmer.
“Was it real?” I ask him, low, so it stays between us. “What she had with him. On Earth.”
He’s quiet for a moment, watching her ahead of us, her hands moving when she talks, Azaan already coaxing a real smile out of her.
“Does it matter?”
“She thinks it does.”
“She thinks it does because she’s kind, and kind people can’t stand the idea that they loved a lie.” He tips his head. “You and I know better. It doesn’t matter whether Mordecai felt anything. Men like him feel things the way a fire feels a house. It’s still going to burn it down.”
“So no.”
“So it doesn’t matter.” His voice goes flat and hard, which on Valerian is as good as a shout. “What matters is that he had six years inside her life and none of us can take that back. All we can do is make the rest of it ours.”
I look at her. Blonde hair coming loose, one ridiculous heel already scuffed white on the rock, mouthing off at Azaan about something. My mate. My Queen. The best thing that ever crawled through a portal into this hellhole.
“I’d have died in there,” I tell Valerian. “For her.”
“I know.” He almost smiles. “You’d have been no use to her dead, which is why I made you wait. But I know.”
We walk a while in silence, and I chew on the thing that’s actually eating me, the thing under the fury and the fear.
“It’s the wearing-her-face part,” I say finally.
“That’s what I can’t get past. That thing, that ancient Demon, wore the shape of a man she loved for six years.
Touched her with hands she trusted. And I couldn’t do a single thing about any of it because it happened on Earth, in a life I wasn’t in, before she ever fell through that book to us.
” My panther growls, low and furious. “I hate that there was a version of her I couldn’t protect.
Six years of her, and he had all of it, and he spent it lying. ”
“You can’t protect her from her past, Luka.
” Valerian’s voice is quiet, and older than usual.
“None of us can. We can only make the rest of it safe. That’s the deal you make, loving someone who lived before you met them.
You don’t get the years that hurt them. You get to be the reason the next ones don’t. ”
“When did you get wise?”
“Three centuries in a book. Nothing to do but think.” He nods at Tabby, ahead of us, alive and mouthy and ours. “Go on. She’s hungry. That’s a problem you can actually solve.”
Ahead, Tabby stops and turns, hand on one hip, and yells back at us, “Are you two gossiping about me? Because it’s rude to whisper. Also I’m starving. When are we eating? No one wants a hangry Queen.”
“Gavriel says that,” I call back.
“Gavriel’s right about one thing a century, and that was it.”
“I heard that,” Gavriel rumbles from behind us.
“You were meant to.”
And there it is, the sound I’d tear a realm apart for. Her laughing. Even now. Even after that cave. I let it settle the panther all the way down, and I go to feed my Queen before she starts biting.
On foot. Again. But she’s walking, and she’s laughing, and she’s ours, so I’ll take it.