Chapter 24
All night, his sisters and mother were in a tizzy with last-minute preparations for the wedding.
Between hurrying about decorating the grounds and chiding him for rushing their planning, Kaden was exhausted by the time he had fallen into bed that evening.
Now the dark hours passed by, and he was lying in bed, unable to sleep. He had hardly even seen Emily since they had returned from the village. Freya had insisted on monopolizing her time for final dress fittings. Knowing that she was only a door away wasn’t making sleep any easier.
Worrying about his lands was one thing. The welfare and safety of his people were yet another thing that he had to worry about all the time. Then, there was the matter of his mother, the future and eventual marriages of his sisters, and what kind of men they might end up with.
He had their reputations and his own revenge to think about. He didn’t have time to worry about another person, and yet he found himself lying in bed wondering if Emily was comfortable, if she was regretting her choices, what she was thinking about the evening before they were to be officially wed.
Did she have cold feet?
More importantly, why didn’t he?
A wife was never supposed to be anything more than a means to have an heir. Then, it would be a handful of years before they were old enough to learn how to rule themselves.
Once he knew that the clan was in good hands and he didn’t have to rule any longer, then he could focus on finding the man who had held him captive for so many years and tearing the bastard limb from limb.
Emily was a constant distraction from that very goal.
Now, he also had to worry about her, because if something happened to him, it might affect her. He had to be able to protect her, to be around long enough to properly care for her. It was…
Well, he wasn’t sure where his head was at. He had thought that their time at the inn had brought them closer. He had thought that the grand gesture was enough. But clearly, he was very wrong.
There was something that he was missing.
But tomorrow, she was going to be standing there in a dress, waiting for him to present a ring and bind their souls together.
Eventually, his eyes started to drift shut at the image of her in a wedding dress.
Was she filled with anticipation as he was?
Was she dreading tomorrow? Going into her room would be a mistake, for she had made it perfectly clear that she didn’t have any desire to see him.
She was likely working on her book anyway.
Kaden huffed and rolled onto his side. He pulled the blanket up over his shoulders, as if that would somehow force him to lie still in a bed that he didn’t think would ever be comfortable.
It was too soft, but he knew that he should force himself to stay there.
He couldn’t sleep on the floor for the rest of his life.
Not without having to answer questions that he didn’t want to bother with.
A loud crash from next door stirred him out of his thoughts. He might have disregarded it if not for the panicked shout coming from Emily in the next moment.
He nearly fell on his face attempting to scramble out of bed so quickly. Blankets and sheets wrapped around him uncomfortably, which he left in a heap behind him as he hurried toward the door that connected their rooms.
It was nearly impossible to see in the dark, as her bed was in the corner. He moved quickly, wishing that he had grabbed something he might defend the pair of them with better. Not that he wasn’t lethal with only his hands as a weapon.
“Emily?” he called, his eyes adjusting to the candlelight.
Her figure slowly came into focus, and he saw her extend her hand toward him.
“Daenae!” she warned, holding Maggie in one hand as she warned him back. “Daenae come any closer. Ye’ll hurt yerself.”
Kaden’s brow furrowed, the thrill giving way to confusion as he slowly put the pieces together. There was a broken glass on the floor beside the bed and a mess of white milk around the shards.
“Maggie knocked over the glass while kicking in her sleep. I daenae want her to step on any of the glass shards,” Emily warned.
Kaden glanced at the glass and then back at his own bare feet and realized that he could have gotten hurt.
Even seeing the issue directly in front of him, he couldn’t shrug off the tension in his shoulders.
It was like his body was in the castle, standing in Emily’s bedroom, near her bed, but his mind was right back in that cell.
Countless nights interrupted by the changing of the guards, who would knock on his cell door at all hours, banging randomly and shouting just so that he couldn’t sleep.
It had been their favorite pastime. They would hit the bars with the handles of their swords or run their blades along the bars of the single window he had.
Sometimes they did it to amuse themselves, other times to let him know that he needed to be awake so that they could have more fun torturing him.
Kaden was only vaguely aware of the cold sweat on his skin as he stared at Emily and Maggie.
“Kaden?” Emily set Maggie on the far side of the bed. “I am unharmed. Maggie is unharmed…”
Her voice sounded very far away, as if she were speaking to him from the end of a long tunnel.
He was vaguely aware that she was scooting across the bed and moving closer to him, her hands outstretched.
She gasped slightly as she drew closer to him, but kept her eyes on his face instead of his bare chest.
He hadn’t thought to dress properly before rushing out of the room to ensure that she was all right.
“I only wanted to keep her from hurting her paws. I didnae mean to frighten ye… Kaden?”
Emily hovered on the edge of the bed, brushing his chest with her fingertips before flattening her palm over his heart. Even this close, her visage was blurry.
“I am sorry,” she murmured.
Kaden’s hand lifted to cover hers where it rested on his chest. He could see it, but he couldn’t feel it touching him. His throat felt overly dry, and the room still threatened to spin.
“It is all right…” Emily soothed as she rose from the bed, her shift nearly translucent in the candlelight.
She lifted his free hand and placed it over her heart so that he might feel the steady beat and know that she was unharmed.
It worked.
The instant dread and loop of memories that threatened to pull him under faded until the scene in front of him felt less like a hazy dream and more like reality.
Emily’s figure came more into focus, and he tried to pull his hands away from her, but this time she forced him to stay still.
“Where did ye go?”
Her beautiful eyes were wide and glossy as they looked up at him, and he knew that he had to make a choice.
He could either choose to trust her and tell her the truth that he had never breathed to another living soul, or he could brush it off as if it were nothing and call for the servants to fetch her a fresh glass of milk and clean up the mess.
He knew which of the two was the more comfortable option; there was certainly no denying that.
Every part of her wanted to beg Kaden to tell her the truth, to open up to her. She wouldn’t go anywhere if he were willing to do that.
There was no denying that the limited view that she had of his skin here in the dim light was…
well, shocking. She could feel the scar tissue under the tips of her fingers, the way his skin had been disfigured by poor treatment, and the way he had tried his best to compensate for it.
He was such a large man; learning how to be functional again had to have been very painful for him.
He was so much stronger than others gave him credit for, and she didn’t think that had anything to do with his battle acumen.
“The noises in the night…” Kaden trailed off and swallowed hard. “Sometimes, there are certain things that take me back, nay matter how hard I try to ignore them or make it better.”
Emily kept quiet so that he would have the freedom to say what he wanted. She didn’t pull her hand away, nor did she allow him to move away from her while he spoke. She didn’t want him to feel ashamed, not with her.
“Banging on the bars, sometimes quickly followed by the bite of a whip,” he said numbly.
He seemed to speak about the events as if they had happened to somebody else. A sort of distance that she presumed something so horrific might as well have happened to her instead.
Despite herself, her gaze drifted downward.
She felt Kaden stiffen under her gaze, but he didn’t stop talking as she took in the tragedy that was his chest. She couldn’t fathom the pain that he must have endured. How could anyone have done this to another person?
“It was something of a pastime to them to see who could draw the most blood, who could keep me from passing out the quickest. I think that most of them found it fun. I’m nae sure exactly at what point a prisoner ceases to be human in the eyes of their captor, but that day had long since passed for the lot of them.
So the loud noises… the…” Kaden trailed off again.
He glanced down at the exposed skin she was touching. “It left something of a mess behind.”
Emily nodded mutely. She couldn’t help but think that perhaps the mess was both inside and out, seeing the way he was speaking about it. She reached up, her fingers curled so that she might brush her knuckles across his cheek. His face truly was the only part of him that seemed mostly unharmed.
“Why daenae ye stay with me tonight?”
Kaden’s eyes widened fractionally.
Emily smirked and shook her head. “I daenae mean it like that. I only mean to sleep, nothing more. Just so ye can relax a wee bit. Ye arenae alone, ye ken?”