Rafe takes the seat by the desk, bracing his elbows on his knees. He still doesn’t say anything, continuing to stare at Elia.
“We’re not sure why she has that ability, but she does, and that’s besides the point anyways,” Ginna insists. “Do you have the ring?”
I’m growing frustrated by this whole situation. “He clearly doesn’t,” I growl, gesturing to his bare hands. I shake my head. “We never should have come. This was a mistake.”
I turn to leave but Elia’s voice stops me dead in my tracks. “Rafe has thering. Don’t you, Rafe?”
Rafe stays hunched over in his chair. “Can you sense it now?” He asks.
Elia shakes her head. “No, I need to be holding the objects, like I said.”
“Then how do you know he has the ring?” Ginna asks.
“Because,” she sighs, as if there is an obvious tell. “Rafe loved Callum, too. Maybe not now anymore, but he did once. And that ring meant something to him. He wouldn’t have discarded it.”
“You don’t know me,” Rafe scoffs gruffly.
“No, but I know Callum, and I know his heart. I know the love he had for you. And that wasn’t one-sided.”
I want to pick Elia up, swing her around, and kiss her. In one sentence she eliminated the fears I’ve always had lingering at the back of my mind.
The relationship Rafe and I shared wasn’t in my head. I wasn’t delusional in believing that Rafe loved me, that there was a strong connection pulling us together. Hedidlove me.
But then that brings up the other questions I’ve always wondered - why didn’t Rafe come back to me? Why didn’t he write?
Rafe leans back in his chair, exhaling deeply. He studies Elia for a few minutes before begrudgingly meeting my gaze.
“She’s right. It was never one-sided."
A shiver courses through my body. His brown eyes drill into me, and I quickly avert my eyes, not wanting him to read any emotion in my face.
He’d always been able to read me, no matter how cold and stonefaced I tried to be.
“So you do have the ring?” I ask quietly. For a second it’s as if we are the only two people in the room.
“Bound by Fate,” he whispers the ring’s inscription, so low I barely hear him. “And so we are bound yet again, apparently.”
“Can we have it?” Rafe clenches his jaw, and before he turns me down I add, “Please, Rafe.”
The flash of emotion when I vocalized his name for the first time today might have been a figment of my imagination. Or it might have been a part of the old Rafe I knew and loved coming to the surface.
At last, Rafe answers me. “You can have the ring.”
I loosen the breath I was holding.
“But I don’t have it with me. It’s back at my place.”
Anxiety eases its way back through my body.
“This isn’t your place?” I ask through gritted teeth.
“Do you think I’d live in a room above a bawdy drunkhouse?”
I shrug. “I don’t know you either, it would seem.”
“How far away is your place?” Ginna asks Rafe.
“Only a couple days by horseback.”
