Chapter 103
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE
I t took a week to burn the last of the bodies.
While watching the black smoke rise into the sky, it was hard not to feel like the corpses of the men I had trained and ordered into war weren’t the only things turning to ashes in my midst.
Every day, I instructed my lemmikki with the same combination of patience and expectation I held for my men, trying to pretend she was just another soldier, that I wasn’t agonizingly aware of every soft inhale and every flush of exertion, like it didn’t bother me to attack every one of her weak spots while I imagined Iiro doing the same.
All the while, her words marched through my head.
It’s not too late for us to live a different sort of life.
It was another chance at a reconciliation at the only price I was unwilling to pay. She knew that as well as I did, but on this, neither of us was willing to bend.
So we didn’t speak outside of what was necessary. We didn’t acknowledge the awkward silence that fell when we both emerged from our opposite rooms at the same time, or at the inherent wrongness of going our separate ways every night.
Kirill had returned from his brief leave, back to his post outside her door.
“You keep saying that wars take time,” he told me one night. “But neither of you seems to be fighting this one.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant fighting with each other or fighting for each other, but both were true right now.
Not too late for us.
But every time I tried to imagine another way out, I saw her body distorted and defiled, her skin marred by the same words Iiro had carved into the villagers’ flesh. So we continued in our stalemate, locked in a holding pattern of hoping the other would change.
I turned my efforts even more fully toward the actual war. If we could end it, take away the likelihood of another scenario like this one, then all of this would cease to matter.
I had to believe she wouldn’t actually leave once the issue at hand was resolved. We had plenty of differences in opinions, though this one had proven more…contentious than the rest.
In any event, Iiro was silent. So was Korhonan, for that matter. I only knew he was alive because of reports from the single man I had managed to sneak across the border, and I still had no idea how or when Rowan had left him.
We were hardly on the kind of speaking terms for me to ask.
There was plenty of preparation to be done in their absence, though, including corresponding with both Lynx and Crane, now that the birds weren’t being shot down the moment they took off.
Still, to be safe, we sent most of our notes for Arès through Mila, in thinly coded language. Even if they were shot down, a letter from his daughter was unlikely to be scrutinized.
She was, after all, a woman.
When I had gathered the reports I needed to respond to Arès, I went in search of Mila to lend me her handwriting. Taras was out training the men, but a maid let me know she was in the tearoom.
Of course, so was my wife, but it wasn’t like we could avoid each other under the circumstances.
The door to the enormous room was ajar, so I slipped inside, taking a breath to announce my presence when my wife’s voice carried across the empty space.
“There’s no baby. Just a mountain of stress, as it turns out.”
I froze.
No baby.
She said it like it was a surprise. Like she thought there had been a baby, something Mila had evidently known.
Which made one of us.
The past week raced through my mind, punctuated by the several hours a day we spent in silence, walking from one meeting to another, sparring, sleeping across the storms-damned hall from each other.
How long had she suspected she was carrying our child? Yet she hadn’t found a single spare moment to mention it?
Hadn’t wanted to.
A memory assaulted me of her twirling a midnight vial in her hands on our wedding night, needing to know if I wanted a family with her, wresting the unwilling admission from my soul.
Was it worse that she had been willing to keep that possibility from me, knowing what it meant for me to want it?
Or that in the midst of a war, she would have preferred to bear that burden alone, the fear and the uncertainty, rather than trust me with it?
You said you wanted to share your life with me.
It seems I wasn’t the only one who had fallen short of that promise.
“You thought there was a baby, and you didn’t think to tell me?” My voice was heavy with pain for her, pain from her.
Rowan froze from where she was sitting with her back to me, while Mila jumped up to leave. I couldn’t even bring myself to care that we had an audience, though Mila was quick to excuse herself. I barely registered the moment she left, unable to look away from the unmoving mass of curls that was all I could see of my wife.
Slowly, gracefully, Rowan got to her feet, turning to face me like a man walking to the gallows.
“Let’s not pretend we have the kind of relationship where we tell each other everything, Evander,” she said, defensiveness creeping into her tone.
She couldn’t be serious. I straightened to my full height, regaining control of my features, if not the reaction that still spiraled from my control, morphing into something so much bigger than I expected it to be. Something I had no context at all for.
“So because I kept something from you, you would have, what, taken our child to Lochlann and never told me?” I clarified in a voice far calmer than I felt.
She reared back. “Of course not.”
I took a breath, the razor sharp pain in my chest easing with her rapid denial.
“I would have told you when and if it became relevant,” she went on. “Which is, by the way, more courtesy than you have shown me. But there’s really nothing to concern yourself with, because there is no baby.” She cut off abruptly, like something had caught in her throat.
Then she swallowed back whatever emotion had overtaken her, meeting my gaze. “There never was. So, that’s a relief, right?”
Relief.
Her pale-green eyes met mine, and for a moment, I saw them staring at me from an entirely different face, one with olive skin and perfectly bowed lips and riotous curls in my onyx shade.
But she was relieved not to have that particular complication tying her to me.
“Yes,” I echoed hollowly, watching a pyre burn somewhere in the back of my mind. “A relief.”
She blinked once, then gave a single, minute dip of her chin before striding past me.
Leaving me alone.