23. Logan #2
“You brought eight home and one changed man.” Her eyes came up to mine, and there it was…
the distance between us. “Dr. Wise found the original warding grounds. We hold there, Logan. The old, protected earth defies his creatures the way plain dirt can’t.
We resist where the first shifters already dug the trenches.
We make him come to us across ground that’s ours, and we do not hand him the multimorph on his own doorstep, which is the one thing he has wanted for hundreds of years.
With you, as… as…” She paused. “As the magic lamp you are now, he can’t even make good on his blood feud. We. Hold. There.”
“Holding is losing slower.” My voice rose, and I couldn’t stop it.
She was being ridiculous. “Every night we delay, the wound gets wider and the horde gets bigger. You want to fight him at full strength when he’s ready?
” I yelled. “That’s not a plan, Emma. That’s a funeral with good seating.
” And I can’t let you martyr yourself inside a dome…
“Striking is exactly what he wants.” She kept her voice even. “He has spent this entire war trying to pull us south. Trying to pull me south. And you want to run at him because—” She stopped.
“Say it.”
“Because you think you can end it.” Her voice broke. “Because there’s a woman walking at the front of that horde. You left her behind once, and you have not forgiven yourself for a single hour since. You would burn down the Void to reach her. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“It’s not for her…” I rasped. My heart clenched. “It’s for you.”
Emma squeezed her eyes closed. “It’s not your choice.”
Garrick shifted his shoulders. “The alpha’s not wrong about the window—”
“Out,” I roared. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t spare a glance for any of them. “All of you. Now.”
They all exited. Even Torbin, who paused in the doorway long enough to set one enormous hand on the frame like he was reminding the house to be there when he got back, and then he was gone.
Our study door clicked shut, closing the two of us in with a wall between us and the maps of a war neither of us was arguing about anymore.
“You want to know what I’m afraid of?” I whispered.
She didn’t answer, but tears glittered in her emerald eyes.
Let me in, Emma. What happened to us?
The barrier didn’t fall.
“I’ll tell you, since we’re doing this,” I began.
“Every day since No Man’s Land, there’s a voice in the back of my head telling me how much bigger my power could be.
Death becomes me. That’s the thing I hear when I close my eyes, and I am terrified that when this is over, whoever’s left standing in my skin won’t be a man you’d cross a room for.
Now you’re pulling away, and I don’t know what to do.
” I dragged in a breath. “That’s my side.
On the table. The way we said. Now you.”
Her eyes filled, but she didn’t let any tears fall. My magnificent, stubborn mate dammed the flood back with the set of her jaw.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“You can. You made me promise—”
“I know what I made you promise.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, and when she lowered them, she sagged.
“You think I don’t feel the separation between us every second?
I put it there. You think it doesn’t cost me?
I hate it,” she spat, “but there is something I know now, Logan, about what I am, about what it costs to be the one who fixes what Acheron breaks. Still, I would give this to you. I would give you all of it. I would open every door I’ve got and let you carry half of this…
this… this…” She paused and lifted her chin. “Except I can’t.”
“You can.”
She shook her head, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I can’t tell you why I’m quiet without telling you all of it, and I can’t tell you because he’s in there, Logan.” She pointed at my head.
The floor tilted.
“He burned it into you in No Man’s Land,” she said, gentle as the healer she was, setting a broken bone.
“The premonition. My death, on a loop, in your head. That’s not a scar, love.
That’s a window. Anything I put in your head, I might put in his.
Every word I give you is a word I hand to the one who’s coming to eat us.
The door isn’t me shutting you out.” A tear got away from her, finally, one, and she let it roll over the beautiful, tortured planes of her face.
Shit, Emma. I love you. I can’t live without you. My wolf howled while I said nothing.
“It’s the only wall in our bond he can’t see through, and I must keep it up, and I can’t even tell you that much without… without…” She stopped, then laughed without humor. “Without telling you that much. Which I just did. God.”
I stood there in my own study with my heart coming apart.
Somehow, she’d learned about the premonition, and she’d been protecting our war.
I finally understood what she’d been carrying alone, and the worst of it, the very worst of it, was that she was right to put the whole world ahead of me… ahead of us.
Fuckity, fuck, fuck.
I reached for her through the bond anyway and put my hand flat against the wall she’d made like someone would press their palm to a window when the person on the other side was walking away.
Her chin quivered, and she pressed back.
I felt it, felt her soul. There. Just beyond reach.
But she kept the door shut.
“Emma—”
“Please.” The multimorph didn’t say please. “Don’t make me choose between the door and you. I’ll lose. We all will.”