Chapter 11 The Wardens Confession #4
She died believing that I did not love her, and I did not have the chance to tell her that she was wrong, because the Bond broke when she died, and the breaking was like losing a limb, like losing half my mind, like the world being torn in half, and I have spent every moment of the three thousand years since then making sure that I never, never put another being in the position of feeling my emotional suppression through a Bond.
" The silence that followed his words was the most profound silence Sera had experienced in the Umbral Realm, a silence that seemed to press against the walls of the small chamber and thicken the air and slow the nightbloom's pulse to something barely perceptible.
She could feel the depth of his grief, not as an observer but as a participant, his shadow-touched bloodline and her Shadow-Touched sensitivity combining to create a resonance that was almost Bond-like in its intensity, and the grief was not a memory but a living thing, a wound that had never healed because he had never allowed it to, a wound that he had packed with duty and control and the ruthless suppression of every emotion that might have allowed the healing to begin.
"My coldness toward you," Malakor said, and his voice was steadier now, the act of speaking the truth having drained some of the urgency from it, leaving behind the quieter, more sustainable resonance of honesty.
"My distance. My refusal to engage with you on a personal level.
It was not because of the prophecy. It was not because I doubted your worth or questioned your intentions.
It was because I recognized, almost immediately, that you had the same capacity to see through me that Lyra had, and the thought of allowing another being that close, of creating the conditions for another Bond that could be damaged by my duty, was more than I could bear.
" He looked at her, and his amber eyes held an expression she had never seen in them before, not the controlled warmth of political consideration or the fierce, protective heat of the Descent but something rawer and more specific, the look of a man who has just dismantled the walls he spent three thousand years building and is standing in the rubble, exposed and terrified and hoping, against all evidence and all experience, that the woman before him will not walk away.
"I treated you the way I did because I was afraid," he said.
"And I am still afraid. But I am more afraid of what will happen if I do not tell you the truth.
You deserve the truth, Sera. You have deserved it since the moment you arrived.
And the truth is this: I am not the cold, controlled Warden that I have shown you.
I am a man who has been alone for three thousand years because he was too afraid of causing harm to allow himself to be loved.
And when I look at you, I feel things that I have not felt since Lyra, and the feeling is so large and so terrifying and so completely beyond my ability to manage that I have been standing outside your door for three days, trying to find the courage to tell you, and failing, until tonight.
" Sera sat very still, and the tears she had been holding back for three days rose in her eyes and spilled over her cheeks, and she did not wipe them away because wiping them away would have required breaking the connection that she felt between them, the fragile, luminous thread of shared vulnerability that his confession had spun across the space between their bodies like a bridge made of silver light.