She remembered how her mother would murmur that it was fortunate, so fortunate, that one of the neighbor’s animals had fallen ill, that it would have gone to waste otherwise.
Lyssena had eaten with sticky fingers and shining eyes.
“I killed them,” Erevos said, his words were not boastful or cruel. Simply factual. “Every chicken that devoured what you planted. Every pig that uprooted what you tended.”
Her breath came slower now.
“You were fond of the yellow flowers by the fence,” he added. “You cried when they were crushed.”
She had, and she had forgotten that. But now she could see herself kneeling in the dirt, small fingers trying to press broken stems back into the soil, her vision blurred with tears while her mother told her that some things did not grow back once ruined.
A strange warmth began to spread through her chest, confusing and overwhelming. All those moments she had believed to be chance. All those tiny mercies.
“You . . . did that for me?” she whispered.
“For you,” he answered.
Not for her family, forher. And he never asked for a single prayer or a gift.
Lyssena’s anger, which had burned so fiercely only moments before, began to soften, melting into something tender and aching and impossibly intimate.
He had watched her delight in honey.
He had noticed her tears over flowers.
He had known the rhythm of her household well enough to slip coins into a drawer without being seen.
He had been there.
Through winters and harvests and small birthdays and disappointments.
Always there.
“You were . . . kind,” she said at last, the words trembling as they left her mouth.
She did not know whether she meant to accuse him or thank him. What kind of being memorized the things that made her smile? What kind of being killed for her flowers?
And yet . . . What kind of being did all that and never asked for anything in return?
Lyssena lowered herself back into her chair without breaking eye contact, her pulse no longer racing in fear but in something softer.
“You were taking care of me,” she murmured.
And for the first time since the conversation began, her voice held no edge at all.
Chapter Thirty
The Bloom Beneath His Chest
Erevos
“Iwill always take care of you. I will always choose you, and my greatest desire is for you to choose me in return,” Erevos said, watching as a single tear gathered at the corner of his songbird’s eye, trembling there like a fragile jewel that did not yet know whether to fall.
He did not fully understand why she wept.
He understood sorrow when it was harvested, fear when it was tasted, devotion when it was offered in trembling prayer, but this sharp and luminous grief born from his promise was something unfamiliar, something that did not resemble the emotions he had consumed for centuries. And yet he knew that she was his whole existence.
Before Lyssena, he had not been interested in anything at all.
