His voice was so fucking real to me. But in the way that dreams sometimes don’t make sense, I could see now that Thaleo didn’t look quite right. I couldn’t see his face, but the outline of his body was wrong. His long hair was gone.
“I don’t want to,” I choked out. “I don’t want to sleep. And I don’t want to wake up.”
Because when I do, you won’t be here.
He got into the bed with me then, and panic flooded me. Because this felt so damn real that there was no way I’d be able to keep sleeping through it. Like a dropped stitch on a knitting needle, the dream would lose its pattern and unravel.
But it didn’t happen. Thaleo laid his body down behind me, and it felt just like him. I could feel the heat of him. I could fucking smell him.
“Thaleo?!” I was afraid even to say his name.
“Yes?” Knuckles drifted along the line of my cheekbone, the shell of my ear. Quietly, as if testing the word, he added, “Mate.”
I jumped out of the bed.
“You’re real,” I stammered, shaking violently. “Are you? You are, right? You’re here with me?”
Thaleo sat up and faced me. Like this, the balcony with its window was behind me, the moon and starlight falling across his face.
It was a face I recognized, but also didn’t. The long hair with its white streak was gone, just as I’d thought. His eyebrows, too, as if something had burned all the hair away. But his skin was entirely intact. Even…
“Your scar!” I gasped. “It’s gone!”
“Is it?” He reached up and touched his own face, his fingertips tracing the line of an old wound which was not there. “The borog’s blood destroyed much of my flesh,” he finally said. “When the Vrika healed me, I suppose that it all grew anew.”
With trembling hands, I reached out and touched him then. Smoothed my palms over his head, the places his brows had been. Even his sight stars matched up now, his left eye no longer saddled with his uncle’s damage. I cupped his jaw.
It was him.
This wasn’t a dream.
I broke down, unable to be strong for him. Tears poured from me, and Thaleo asked me what he could do for me, what he could do to make this all better. But I just shook my head and told him he’d already made it better. He’d already made it perfect.
And then, I asked him to tell me what happened.
He drew me gently into his lap, stroking me as he told me everything. He explained how, after I’d fallen asleep, the borog came and chased off the Vrika. That it had happened so quickly that no one else had seen, and he’d been compelled to followalone on Yeralk. He told me how he’d killed the borog. That he’d almost died. That he should have.
“But the Vrika brought me to its nest,” he said, his fingers never moving from my body, my hair. “It healed me with blood from its own body. Even so, I needed time to recover. I slept for a long time before I woke, found Yeralk, and returned. But before that sleep, when I was up there…The Vrika gave me my mate vision.”
My breath stopped.
“It was you, Nazreen.” Thaleo’s voice was thick with something that might have been pain. Might have been awe. “It was always you.”
“Are you just saying that?” I asked, even though I knew he was telling the truth. I’d once considered him a reprehensible liar.
But he wouldn’t lie to me. Not about this.
“It was your face I saw there,” he said. “I do not know how I could have believed it to be any other.”
“But…Why did the Vrika wait so long?”
Thaleo could have been saved so much suffering over trying to choose between his duty and me if he’d known I was his mate from the very beginning. Hell, Gahn Buroudei got his mate vision of Cece before we even arrived on this planet!
“I do not think that would have worked,” he said softly, his sight stars caressing my face. “You had to be free to choose me on your own. And I, you.”
He was right. Would I ever have loved him, ever have let him in, if he’d tried to claim me as his mate from the beginning?
No. I probably would have pushed him away every chance I got.
