18. And it all comes crashing down #2
“Eilir.” In the vicinity behind me, something an awful lot like fear colored Maksym’s voice. “Care to elaborate, or…?”
“I messed up!” they squeaked. “I-I s-said… Well, I-I said that—”
“They said I know you, mage,” I ground out, the wall of dark mist holding me back despite my best efforts to throw my body, or at least a fist, through it.
“That I know what you look like. That it’s been a long time.
Care to fucking elaborate on that revelation?
Or are the two of you just going to continue spinning more goddess-damned lies? ”
A bit of tension ticked in Jasper’s jaw, but still, he was silent.
“Oh, good,” came Maksym’s exasperated sigh. “Thank you so much for that, Eilir.”
“It was a mistake,” the sprite whined. “I didn’t mean to!”
“Yeah,” I called back. “They fucked up really goddess-damned badly. How dare they be the only living creature in this cursed keep to have a shred of fucking honesty in them? What a despicable quality amongst such illustrious dark fae, right?”
“Enora,” came Eilir’s disregarded whine.
“Well,” huffed Maksym. “Let’s drag this feral hellcat the rest of the way out of the bag, shall we?”
Finally, the mage uttered his first strained word. “No.”
“No?” Maksym barked a laugh. “I think we’re past simple protests now, my dear friend. Something tells me she isn’t in the mood to take no for an answer.”
She.
They were out to make my blood boil even more than it already had.
“We agreed it was my choice, Max.” Jasper had his attention turned past me, to the king who was closing the distance between them. “My choice, my terms.”
The king cut his mage a sharp glance. “It’s not a choice anymore, Jasper. It’s an honesty thing. We can’t be harboring secrets from each other here, not anymore.”
“A voice of fucking reason,” I ground out, though it was a shock I could hear anything over the rushing of my blood in my ears.
“Maksym,” Jasper warned, and the bite in his voice caught me off guard. It didn’t stop me from still clawing at the shadowy barrier like I had any chance against it. “We discussed this.”
“And things have changed rather dramatically.” It looked like Maksym might slice his mage down where he stood with how intently he stared. “Demergo. The hood, Jasper. Off. Now.”
I wasn’t sure what the word meant, but I had a sickening feeling I understood the purpose of it as the shadowy wall dissipated from in front of me, and Jasper staggered as if he’d been hit.
It wasn’t just a bargain; it was a full-fledged blood oath.
One of the many reasons traditional dark fae practices were outlawed in Odessa, when their darkest versions could see one being indebted to the other so irrefutably, at full beck and call with a single word.
The mage swore, clearly fighting the pull of his muscles as his arms lifted.
“This is ridiculous.” My attention bounced between Maksym and his mage. “Who the hell are you that this is such a—”
“You weren’t supposed to find out like this,” Jasper said as his shaking, gloved hands rose to the thick trim of his hood. “I’m sorry.”
His shroud fell back, pulling a haze of smoky magic with it.
I blinked once. Twice. A third desperate time.
My eyes didn’t understand what I was seeing—who I was seeing.
A shaky breath sawed out of my lungs. My vision blurred a little, like it too was desperate not to process the unveiled man standing before me—who I had spent an entire day alone with, completely unaware.
It was partly because I’d spent years trying to scour every fleeting, agonizing memory of him from my mind. But it was in equal part because he’d barely been a grown man when I last saw him, just a lanky seventeen-year-old who hadn’t grown into his height yet.
Fifteen fucking years ago.
Back then, his shoulders hadn’t been as broad. His body hadn’t been wrought with honed muscle, well-defined even through layers of dress meant to incite modesty.
He hadn’t worn a leather patch over his eye then either, barely disguising a network of scars and dark veining crawling out from his left side. But his hale eye was as mesmerizing a shade of earthy green as it had always been.
More stubble decorated his jaw than I ever remembered, but I’d never forget his nose and its almost imperceptible crookedness. His hair was still stark white-blond, shorter on the sides and a haphazard mess on top.
Fifteen fucking years, and it was him.
No wonder I’d fallen into such a disarming state of comfort despite thinking he was a stranger. Some subconscious part of my being would always know who he was, despite how desperately I’d worked to scourge my mind of his reassuring presence.
My body went so slack, I swayed on the spot.
He had never been a factor in any of this.
“No,” I rasped. “K-Kieran?”
His mouth tightened, tugging at the scar running up along the side of his chin, and acid burned at the back of my throat. I was terrifyingly close to being sick. Seconds seemed to stretch into minutes before my mind could form any further thoughts. Even then, they came in sharp, fragmented pieces.
“You…you…” I licked my lips, but there wasn’t an ounce of moisture to be found. My eyes swept the training arena before landing back on him. “Here? This is where you…?”
A nod. A fucking nod.
Its devastating simplicity threatened to take me out at the knees.
I could only stare at the man who’d once been a boy I thought I knew better than myself.
A boy who had been a constant in my life for all my formative years—who was supposed to be a constant endlessly.
Until he suddenly wasn’t.
He watched me back with visible apprehension. His uncovered eye did not leave my face, like he wasn’t sure if I was a wounded animal about to bolt or if he needed to make an exit for his safety. I wasn’t sure either.
My heart pounded so hard in my chest, I was certain it was about to start echoing off the walls at any moment—as soon as it finished beating its way out from behind my ribs.
Kieran.
Fucking Kieran.
“This was…not the reunion I thought it’d be.
” Maksym was beside me suddenly, letting out an uneasy chuckle.
He squeezed my shoulders and held my wavering body steady.
“I expected a little more jubilation, truthfully. Jasper—er, Kieran, I suppose—led me to believe you two had been thick as thieves when you were young. We’ll really have to take a vote on what name to—”
“Maksym,” Kieran—not Jasper—warned, his voice authoritative in a way I’d never heard from him before.
But as if my wits came rushing back all at once at the king’s forceful reinsertion of his presence, it hit me why the name Jasper carried a strange undercurrent of familiarity when I’d first heard it uttered outside my cell.
I’d heard it at least a hundred times during my youth, after all, when Kieran had recounted memories of his father to me—Jasper Morana.
The man Kieran hailed as his hero for seeing that his only son, and youngest child, was made a ward of Odessa and granted haven while an illness ravaged their settlement in the Wastes.
It was a stark contrast to how my father had told me Kieran had ended up under his care, but that was a truth I expected to die with.
I should have asked my oldest friend what drove him to take up his father’s moniker after he absconded from our kingdom—after my father poured years of resources into training him to be a mage—but I was certain I’d scream if he tried to explain anything to me.
Kieran seemed to accept Maksym’s silence and skyward gaze, and his voice softened immeasurably, into one the deepest parts of my soul would recognize and grieve forever. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
Such a simple statement, uttered with such earnestness, but it was enough to fan my budding ember of volatile shock into a deadly inferno.
I had no control over the bark of bitter laughter that clawed out of me.
“Like hell we do.” With agitated sweeps, I removed Maksym’s hands from my shoulders, even though he seemed to want to bore me into the earth. “I have no words for a fucking deserter like yourself.”
Getting out of the suffocating training arena was the only tangible option my mind could grasp, and I headed straight for the exit.
I paid little heed to how Maksym sputtered, “Wait a second.”
“Come on, Nor,” Kieran sighed.
What a mistake.
I turned back and snapped, “Fuck you, Kieran. Fuck. You. You do not get to call me that. Not after you turned your back on us and threw everything my father did for you in his face. Do you know how many years I grieved for you? The hell I went through? We are not friends.”
Fifteen years, those words had sat trapped in my throat, eating away at me, even when I fought to give them no credence, yet I felt no relief at finally getting them out. No, my chest was going to burst from the pressure of emotion that just wouldn’t yield.
That had to be what drove me to seethe, “And you know what? Fuck you too, Maksym. Some fucking piss-poor excuse for a king you are.”
Both men stared at me with matched looks of shock and disappointment as Eilir started sputtering outraged noises, but I didn’t stick around for any of them to say another word.