Chapter 42
DAVID
“What the hell happened?” Sean asked later that night. “It’s the one thing I don’t understand. How did they find us?”
David had shut the two of them inside their favorite sitting room, and Sean collapsed onto one of the sofas, his elbows on his knees. It had taken him and Bowenn a full hour of debriefing with the Council before they’d let him free, and in that time, David sensed he’d closed in on himself.
The shattering pain of his emotions was impossible to ignore as it attacked David through both his magic and their connection. The grief and guilt had consumed him, and rightfully so.
Sean’s father had died protecting him.
David, however, chose to play hide-and-seek with this new stark reality, the one where Kywyn didn’t exist. It hadn’t occurred to him that losing Sean’s father would feel the same as losing his own—one he actually cared about and wanted around.
The icicles of grief wanted to prick their pointy noses deep into his heart.
He refused.
Denial was a sweet, sweet liquor. Went down far too easy.
“I think,” David said from the sofa opposite, keeping his tone carefully neutral, “it was me.”
Sean looked up, blue eyes heavy. “How?”
“Something happened.” He pressed his palm to his chest, right where his connection to Sean burrowed. “I don’t know. I was fine, and then suddenly…I just wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
David dragged his palms over his face. “It all burst apart. All my walls. All the ice. Years of suppressed emotion. I don’t know. I think it lured them in.”
Sean tilted his head, a slow, pensive gesture. “What triggered it?”
David’s ice had rebuilt nicely, so the flare of panic was a mere flicker inside the glacier. “Isobel.”
“Isobel?” Sean’s tone lifted, surprised. “What did she do?”
Gaze firmly planted on the table between them, David inhaled one slow breath. “She’s…pregnant.”
Silence.
He didn’t need to look at Sean to know he was putting it together—maybe not all of it, but enough.
“I’d felt something,” Sean said after a while. “Just before they showed up. It was like a heart attack.”
David chuckled darkly. “It was a panic attack.”
Another long stretch of stillness descended before Sean blew out a noisy puff of air. “Emotion bait.”
David glanced up, catching on that familiar deep blue. “Huh?”
“Your emotions were like bait. We could use that.”
Blinking a few times, David tried to discern his rationale. “No. They almost killed us.”
“Right,” Sean said, his voice dead while his emotional core churned with broken glass. “But if we control the situation, bait could lure them right into a trap.”
He wasn’t wrong, but that was a dangerous game to play. “You should take a break from thinking about this. Decompress, Sean.”
His soulmate nodded slowly, expression blank, posture still hunched. He opened his mouth once, twice, then shook himself. His voice, when he finally spoke, grated from his throat, raw and uneven. “I killed people today.”
The shattered glass of his emotions clogged in their connection, cutting, shredding, making them both bleed.
“Sean.” David scooted to the edge of his seat. “When it’s kill or be killed, the right choice is not laying down your weapons. If you hadn’t fought today, we’d probably all be dead.”
Squeezing his eyes shut, Sean said, “How am I supposed to save this whole realm when I couldn’t even save my own father?”
David shook his head. “That isn’t how it works.”
“I’m not who they want me to be. I cannot win this war for them.”
“You don’t have to. The war of our fathers isn’t ours to bear.”
Sean let out a single humorless laugh. “Yeah? Then why do they call me Ashanta? Why are they constantly reminding me where I came from and who I am?”
“Only you can decide who you are,” David said, quiet but firm.
Sean’s cobalt gaze found him once more, still compressed, breaking under the weight of obligation. “I’m a murderer.”
“So am I.” The words came easy even though he hated the truth of them. But this was Sean, his counterpart. Sean could withstand the harsher truths.
“It—it felt different than I thought it would.”
He tilted his head. “How?”
“I don’t know.” Sean dropped his gaze to his clasped hands. “Easier?”
David swallowed down the taste of acid. “It gets hard when you realize a part of you dies with them each time.”
Sean released a stuttered breath. “There’s going to be so many more lives lost.”
Nodding, David said, “You finally understand it, don’t you?”
“Understand what?” Sean asked, though his tone suggested he already knew.
“They will fight a holy war for you. For everything you represent. They will die for you.”
Sean braced his forehead, like an ache had bloomed there. “How much blood will be spilled in my name before it’s all over?”
“That isn’t what’s important.”
“Then what is, David?” he asked, a shade of irritation blossoming in his tone.
“We need to accept who you are, Sean. War is coming, whether it’s with Indigo or not, and when it does, they’ll look to you. Countless lives will suffer if you’re not ready, and you’ll blame yourself for all of it.”
Sean froze. “That can’t be true.”
“It is. When the time comes, you will raise your blade, and they’ll follow.”
His stare penetrated, intense enough that David fought the urge to look away. “How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve Seen it. And now that we’re one, someday you will, too.”