Chapter 4 #3
Jesstin climbed in beside her. Though he was much taller and broader, there was room to spare. He faced her, one knee folded on the seat, his other foot touching the floor. His hands seemed to search for something to do before ending up in his lap. “I didn’t think I’d find you so soon.”
“I didn’t expect to see you at all,” she said. The war within her had finally eased off. “Ever again.”
“Didn’t part on the greatest terms, did we?”
“No,” she answered coolly. “We certainly did not.”
“I have something to say, if you’ll hear me.”
She chose not to respond. Pride and relief harnessed the pain, but she knew she couldn’t keep it from her words.
“El?”
She gestured in affirmation.
He nodded to himself with a resigned sigh. “I’m not a good person, Elloven. The people who love me tell themselves what they need to believe otherwise, but there are things I’ve done that would destroy what little faith they still have in me, especially if they knew how shallow my remorse runs.”
Elloven anchored herself against the chair’s arm, a subtle shrink his eyes reacted to.
“I deal in need fulfillment.” Jesstin pushed a slow breath through his pursed lips.
“My club is safe. I promise discretion. I stop disruptions before they occur. No judgment slips into any transaction. We might be the fringes and trimmings of society in the eyes of others, but there’s more loyalty and honor in the village than you’ll find anywhere else.
My code may not align with most of society’s, but it’s everything to me.
I didn’t end up in Mythgarde because nowhere else wanted me; I chose it.
I chose everything that came with it. I would choose it again. ”
She said nothing. Couldn’t, even if she knew what to say, and she didn’t.
He studied his lap, his upturned palms. A finger twitched, bending inward.
“But I have so much rage in me, it had to go somewhere. So I built something real with it, and it’s not mine anymore, but it will outlast me.
How many can say this? That while everyone was applauding their failure, they scratched and climbed and rose above their antagonists. How many can say this?”
“I don’t know,” she answered softly, wondering where he was taking her.
“Esmeray is one of the few people who always told me to put my past in a box and seal it, because it wasn’t useful.
And then for her to ask me to tear open the box and draw upon the reputation of both my fathers when it benefited her?
It was an infidelity to a code only I cared about, it seemed, and she was so damaged, I could only tell her yes. ”
“She was desperate.” And likely blitzed out of her mind. “Taven knew for a while what I was going to do to Fabrien and his friends, and he kept it from my mother until he was loading the wagon to come get me. She couldn’t trust him. She didn’t know where else to go.”
“It wasn’t that she asked me, it was why. After all she’d said before, in the end she was no different than the others. So much for the sealed box.”
“She also asked you because she knew you loved Gen.”
His eyes briefly closed. “I needed to paint you a picture of who I’ve been since I was ten years old, to make sense of my words and behaviors, which have been in conflict since I jumped into that carriage.”
Elloven drew her legs up and folded herself around them. She could guess where he was going, and it made her long to hide, to leave, even though it was the last thing in the world she wanted.
“You know, Rhiain, she... She needed to believe I wasn’t who I’d been telling her I was for years, that I was just going through a rough spot but I’d grow out of it.
But you...” His lips parted in a wide, emotive laugh, his head lolling back.
A tear broke free and rolled from his chin onto his bent knee.
“No one had ever made me ashamed of the life I’d made for myself until you.
You just took it all, in one look.” His voice broke. “In one fucking look.”
Elloven rolled her lower lip in, shaking her head. “I never wanted that.” He had it all wrong, and that was what she should have said.
“I know.” He slid one hand from his lap to cover one of hers, such a sensitive gesture from such a destructive man. “I’m messing this up. Badly.”
“Just say what you mean, Jesstin.”
“You didn’t do—Elloven, I built an entire life out of being seen as a villain because it was the only way I could keep them from seeing me.”
His experiences were not hers, not the life she’d lived, but she’d molded herself uniquely for each predator.
She understood the paradoxical formations required to hide within false safety while choking on the humiliation of them.
But that was why Jesstin’s words that night had burrowed so deep.
He had seen her and had used what he’d seen to hurt her in a way no one ever had.
In the most meaningful way, his betrayal was greater than anything any of the others had ever done.
Bones could heal. Hearts weren’t so easily mended.
“What happened that night, in the croft...” A slow swallow moved down his throat.
“I wish I could say I was just tired and frustrated, but in those moments... Elloven, I hated you. I hated you for your consistent, stubborn determination to push me to challenge myself, because until you? Until you, not a single person had the power.” His hand clamped tight over hers. “And I needed you to feel that too.”
Elloven could barely get the words out. “You succeeded.”
Sadness clung to him like a second skin. “And I’ve never, ever regretted anything more.”
It was too much, too raw, too real. “Everyone regrets hurting people after they die,” she retorted.
“You didn’t have to come all the way to the Infinitum for that.
” Knowing her life had been a useless waste was strangely a comfort in the Infinitum, a clarity leading to the shattering but necessary conclusion she’d been erased from a world she’d never belonged to anyway.
Jesstin’s cruelty had cut the final thread of hope, freed her.
She’d challenged him? Had he not upended her world too?
And now he was doing it again, infiltrating her safe little escape, where maybe she was lonely and scared, but it was better than being ripped apart by the tease of something real and lasting.
It was a wound only starting to heal, and he wanted to cut out the stitches?
Watch her bleed to clear his conscience?
For weeks, she’d harbored the secret wish he would find her, but not like this.
“The second the words were out, they weren’t mine anymore, and I couldn’t take them back.
But I thought if I could hurt you enough, you’d leave, and if you left, you’d be safe.
” Jesstin cosseted his hands around hers.
“I won’t further insult you by asking you to forgive me, because you shouldn’t.
But you need to know that the things I said about you were so unfair, so myopic and far from the mark, and there’s nothing worse I’ve ever done than obliterating the hopefulness I saw in your eyes when you thought you’d finally met someone who understood.
” He sharply exhaled. “No, the worst thing was how good it felt.”
It was the most frank thing he’d ever said, probably to anyone, and she wished she had half the eloquence he offered her. She hadn’t even decided whether she was feeling relief or anger.
Or love.
The possibility it could be that was the most devastating of all.
His teeth scraped his bottom lip. “And then when I lost you, in the sept...”
When I lost you. Elloven withdrew her hand and made herself small. The pads of his fingers brushed along the side of her jaw, sweeping near her ear, where he tucked some of her hair, and she cringed from that too.
But she missed his warmth the moment he withdrew his hand. “You don’t deserve any of what’s happened to you, Elloven. Only a fucking monster would contribute to your belief otherwise.”
It was always, always later that the right words came, never when she needed them.
She could forgive Taven, despite that he’d never actually apologized for anything, but not this man, speaking from a place of real vulnerability?
If she couldn’t recognize the difference, even if he regretted his words, there was truth to them.
Elloven listened to her heart instead of her busy, meddling mind when she leaned in and rested her forehead against his chin. There was no stopping the shivering, which intensified when his arms formed around her, tentative and restrained but strong and solid.
Her eyes didn’t need to search for his when she tilted her head upward.
In his was the same pain. Why he was there.
.. what he was doing... She had so many questions, but there, then, surrounded by the memories of their candid encounters in the Night Soul, seated upon the chair the king had willed into existence for his queen, she wasn’t sure any of that mattered.
Her upper lip skimmed Jesstin’s lower. She didn’t recognize the woman who’d done it, but her arrival was irreversible. She knew that much.
Jesstin’s soft breath vibrated. She took in the warm ambrosia as she moved her lips higher, their exhalations becoming one, locked in the fork of the two very different paths she could take, each a measure of the extent of her courage.
Then he broke away. His head shook as he angled it down.
The blood plummeted from her face. “I am so sorry,” she blurted in a mortified rush.
“Elloven.”
“I wanted to show you I forgive—”
“No.” He swung his head back up. His gaze was insistent, and when she failed to meet it, he reached for her face and held it in one hand. “We need to talk. We need to sit and really talk, when it’s safe, when we’re together. Before anything else.”
“Together?” Elloven studied his face, but she couldn’t find anything explaining the sudden shift. “But you can’t stay here. You have to get back.”
“I’ll stay as long as it takes.”