Chapter One #2
“Until it isn’t, though, right?” She took a sip from her tumbler. “Until something else comes up, another emergency, another aristocrat who’s trying to kill you, another fight that you refuse to let the Brotherhood handle without you.”
Her tone was resigned rather than angry, and somehow that was worse. It meant this shit was chronic.
“We’ve been through this, leelan—”
“No, I caught you in a lie.” Her voice remained level.
“I confronted you. You apologized. But that’s not enough, so we’ve not ‘been through’ anything.
We’re still in it. You went into the field after telling me you were just going to the Audience House, and the only reason I found out what you really did is because I went looking for you.
And please, let’s not go around in the same circles again.
You never would have told me otherwise. Don’t even try to sell that. ”
“I would totally have talked to you about it.”
“Really? Why put us in this situation then.” As a hitch tripped her voice, she coughed things clear. “You knew I’d lose my shit. That’s why you didn’t go into it with me. You’d made up your mind what you were doing, and you weren’t going to change course, no matter what I said.”
Wrath trained his useless fucking eyes across the table. “I already explained everything. I had to walk through Whestmorel’s place because no one had any clue where he’d gone and I—”
“He was trying to kill you.” Her chair made a scraping noise, as if she’d shoved her seat away from the table. “Do you really think reminding me of everything that was going on that night is going to help things?”
“It’s a non-issue. He’s dead.”
“He wasn’t when you went to his house. He was just missing then, and he was working with a group of aristocrats. What about the Whac-A-mole assholes who were standing with him?”
“I was with the Brotherhood! I was well-defended—”
“Don’t you dare get pissed off with me.” He had a vision of her putting both palms forward.
“The last time you headed out into the night because you needed to, I went to hell and lived there for three decades. So spare me the attitude when you repeated the same thing the minute you came back from the fucking dead, okay.”
Wrath shook his pounding head. “I lost those thirty years, too. Sometimes, I think you forget that.”
“Oh, no, I remember everything. Trust me.”
There was a long pause. And as the silence continued, he couldn’t believe that after fate had taken so much time from the both of them, their sweet reunion had had the shelf life of a raw egg.
“I never cared about the birthdays,” she muttered. “It was the anniversaries...”
Wrath frowned. “I’m sorry?”
Beth cleared her throat again. “I stopped celebrating my birthdays, so, you know, the fact that you weren’t there didn’t matter as much.
But the anniversaries… God, I’d dread them as they came at me like a truck, and it would take weeks to get over it.
I’d miss you so much, my chest would hurt and I couldn’t breathe right.
And honestly, that’s what has been on my mind the most since last Wednesday.
I can’t do that again, Wrath. I just…I can’t go back there. ”
“You aren’t going to—”
“Oh, you can’t promise me that. Even if you don’t go where you shouldn’t. But if you keep heading out into the field? You’re absolutely going to make a liar out of yourself.”
“Look,” he said roughly, “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. I’ve also been apologizing for a week—”
“No, you’re going to skate on me again.” When he went to protest, she cut him off.
“Let’s be real. I have to…be real about what you do, who you are.
And the problem with that is the more I stare reality in the face, the more I remember all of the anniversaries I spent alone.
My widow years all but broke me, Wrath. I’m not the female you left.
I’m what those decades have turned me into, and no apology from you about what you did last week, no matter how earnest in the moment now, can erase those scars. ”
As her pain wafted between them, an acrid smell that was like chemicals burning, he got bedrock angry. At himself. At his fucking throne. At Lash and the Lessening Society, and the aristocrats in the glymera.
At Caldwell, NY, and all of its bullshit.
“I love you,” he said with exhaustion. “And I really am sorry.”
There was another stretch of quiet, one so long, he wondered if she hadn’t somehow snuck out and left him.
“I know you are.” Her voice sounded equally tired. “I’m sorry, too.”
The words were all the right ones on both sides, but they didn’t change the fact that he felt like a piece of shit, and she was still hurting—
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“Tohr’s here.” Beth got up and went to the sink. “Time for you to go.”
Wrath rose to his shitkickers and brought his full plate over to her. “I’m going to make this right. Somehow.”
“My Lord?” came the query on the other side of the door.
Wrath hovered his hand where he thought her shoulder might be. But maybe she stepped away from him.
Ah, hell, she probably didn’t want him to touch her.
“I’ll see you at the end of the night.”
“I’ll be here,” she answered with defeat.
The last thing he wanted to do was leave her. But civilians were waiting for him, bringing their young and their matings for blessings, their disputes for resolution, their crimes for solving, their complaints for sorting.
Yeah, but what happened when the King had his own fucking disputes with his young, who wasn’t talking to anybody, and his mate, who had every reason not to talk to him?
He’d traveled through time and space to return to her and their son, and the life they lived with him as King had wedged a throne-sized divide right between them.
As George bumped into his thigh and his hand automatically locked onto the golden’s harness, he was aware of a striking loneliness. And holy fuck, if this was what she’d felt all those years, how had she managed to exist in hollow grief for as long as she had.
Which was her point, wasn’t it.
Somehow, he had to find a way for them to reconnect. And until he did that, he was so angry, he wanted to put his head through a plate-glass window.
Fortunately, he was long familiar with hating himself.
Welcome fucking home.