“She still loved you, Kaan.” Her voice catches at the end. Like it caught on a hook that also slides through my chest, punctures my heart, and rips it from my rib cage. “You should know,” she grinds out past trembling lips, “witheverybit of her heart,she loved you.”
The words are still echoing as I look at the floor and close my eyes, certain that no words have ever torn me so clean open.
Have ever bled me so fucking dry.
I take a moment to calm the rapid beat of my heart and compose myself into something deserving of her admission. Only when I finally feel like the ground isn’t crumbling beneath my feet do I clear my throat, again meeting her reflection. “You … remember?”
The faintest line forms between her brows before she looks down at the water swirling in the basin. “Not much. The moment was fleeting. More a feeling than anything.”
The lie spills off her tongue so easily, but it’s the way her body closes that contradicts her statement—shoulders peeling in, chin dipping a little. The way she breaks our eye contact before delivering the words like a spoon of sweet syrup.
I don’t take it to heart. Move forward until I’m standing right behind her, reaching around to turn the faucet off. Then I take her hand in mine.
I tug, but she doesn’t move.
So I do it again.
This time, she comes—walking with me back to the pallet, where she lays on her side, facing away from the window. Something I find strange, given how much she likes the snow.
I take off her boots, settle behind her, then ease her so close to my chest I can track each slow breath she takes, enveloping her with my arms and body. Though she softens against me, tangling her legs with mine, a heavy silence crowds the room.
“Do you want to talk about—”
“It’s already gone,” she says, voice monotone. Like a tree stripped of its bark.
Gone …
The statement digs its claws deep.
Again, I close my eyes, taking a moment to recompose myself before kissing the top of her head. Realize that telling her the truth about her past is moot when she appears to be drudging it up herself. Perhaps swallowing one barely digestible truth at a time, just enough so she doesn’t choke.
Instead, I hold her tighter than I ever have, singing “Song of the Silent Sun” as snow batters the windowpanes, the cold shadows in the room appearing darker than they did before. Like they’re closing in on us.
Or perhaps it’s not the shadows at all, but the revelation thatshe still loved me. Something the lark she left banging around in my suite failed to iterate.
She. Loved. Me. Yet she returned to The Shade.
Bound to my brother.
Consummated.
There’s only one answer to this riddle, evident by the way she broke our eye contact before she lied to me just now, softening whatever she unearthed into something she deemed more palatable.
Elluin’s lark was a lie I too easily believed, intended to protect me from something she obviously considered worse than breaking both our hearts. The lesser of two evils.
So what was it?
The haunting thought knots my insides as exhaustion finally wears through the jitung berry Roan dosed me with and drags me under.
My rusty metal pan skids between the bars, food slopping over the sides until it comes to a rattling halt—all but empty—bits of gray meat and moldy bread scattered in its wake.
Tucked in the corner of my cell, I boast a broad smile. Far from genuine.
“Thanks!” I chirp to the masked male charging along the dark tunnel beyond the bars of my confinement.
Manners are important. Especially when charming the guards may be my only hope of getting free.
It doesn’t matter that I’d quite like to curse the fucker until blood boils from his orifices for all the gritty meals I’ve had to consume, if my happy littlethank yougets me so much as a pause, a look, abreathin mydirection… it’s a chance.
