“Andyou, Elian.Youwere my family.” She glanced up at me through dark, tear-stained lashes. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Ididknow it, sparrow. Logically. But at the time, I still blamed myself for his disappearance, as if I should’ve been able to see who’d taken him. As if I could’ve stopped it from happening. Eventually I’d convinced myself that he’d died, and I thought that was my fault, too. I didn’t… I didn’t believe I deserved a love like what you were offering, any more than I deserve your forgiveness now.”
“It wasn’t your call to make then, and it’s still not your call to make now.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Obviously. I never found him. I spent two years searching, and I never even found him, and I lost you in the process. So ultimately, it was all for nothing.”
“Do you think he’s still here?”
“No.”
“But Keradoc’s glamour! Maybe he knew Evander, and that’s how he—”
“Melantha, Haley. It’s all her doing—maybe it always was. She knows how to manipulate us. At this point, I don’t even know if I believe Evander was ever in Midnight to begin with. And if he was? You can bet your ass Keradoc was likely behind it.”
“But he—”
“Haley, don’t. Please don’t. I know you see something else when you look at that man, but all I see—all I willeversee—is a brutal warlord who makes my crimes look like minor skirmishes.”
Haley bristled, but she still didn’t pull away. “So what happened then? You found a way to escape Midnight, just like you’d hoped.”
“I did. But it cost me, sparrow. Dearly.” I tightened my hold on her. “So no, in all the ways that count, I didn’treallyescape Midnight. And now I know I never will.”
“Jax… He told me about his eye—his vision. He said that in exchange for helping you guys leave, Melantha demanded the most important thing from each of you.”
I nodded. “The thing that truly made us who we were. Her exact words.”
“Tell me what it cost you,” she whispered, and I knew she wasn’t asking me about the drug-dealing empire I’d been forced to set up in New Orleans. “Tell me the price you paid to get out.”
I took a shuddering breath, the weight of my confessions pressing on my heart from all sides. “There’s a saying, you know, about a man who’s got nothing left to lose. How it makes him the most dangerous bastard in the room. And Midnight? Hell, you’d think we were all there already—the rock-bottom basement of our terrible lives. How else could someone end up here, of all places? But you know it now, sparrow. The truth is, some of us come here by choice. And for me, the real rock-bottom came after. When I gave up the only thing that had ever truly mattered to me.”
“Tell me, Elian,” she demanded. “Tell me what you gave up.”
It took every last bit of strength I possessed to slide my fingers under her chin and tilt her bruised face up toward mine. To look at her—truly look at her. To hold on to that beautiful green gaze as I dredged the words up from the basement of my heart. And even when I finally did it, even when I could taste them on the tip of my tongue, I still couldn’t bring myself to give them a voice.
Not the actual words of Melantha’s curse. Not the gruesome, vile, despicable things she vowed would happen to Haley if I ever really touched her again. If I ever came close to sharing with her all the intimate, beautiful things I so desperately, desperately wanted to share.
“You, little sparrow,” I finally admitted, the words catching like barbed wire in my throat. “I gave up you. It’s why I never reached out to you after I got to New Orleans, despite how badly I’d wanted to. It’s why I can’t touch you now, even when all I want to do is take you into my arms and kiss you breathless. It’s the price I promised to pay, and if I go back on that promise, if I so much as touch you any more closely than this… You won’t survive, Haley. And if you don’t survive, neither will I.”
Her heartbeat raged against my chest, a fathomless ache swimming in the depths of her eyes. She stared at me for an eternity, searching my face. For what, I had no idea. The truth? She had to see it there, written plain as fucking day, etched in every deep line, every broken shard of glass in my silver eyes.
After an eternity, she pressed her palms to my cheeks and smiled. My sparrow heard the worst of all my confessions, and she fuckingsmiledat me.
God, that smile. It had the power to break me and glue me back together again. Always had.
But her next words punched a hole through my chest and ripped out my beating heart.
“I love you, Elian,” she said plainly. So clear and matter-of-fact it was if it’d been written in the stars at the dawn of time, utterly unchangeable. “I willalwayslove you.”
“You love a ghost. The man you knew—I’m not that man anymore. I’m—”
“No. You’renotthat man.” She pressed a hand to my chest, right over the heart I’d sworn she’d just carved out. “You’rethisman. The one who brought me back from the dead. The one who followed me to Midnight—to the worst hell he’s ever experienced—just because I asked for his help. The one who made mistakes, but never turned his back on me—not really. And for all those past fuckups, for all your present faults, for all the future things you don’t even know you should be sorry for yet, you’re stillmine. Do you hear me? I’mclaimingyou as mine, even if I can’t be yours because of some dark goddess bullshit price. You’re my heart, Elian. You’ve always been my heart. I love you.You. This man, right here.” She patted my chest, harder this time. “I never stopped, and I never will, and no mistakes or dark goddesses or death sentences in a terrible realm will ever change it. Not for me. So I don’t know what that means to you—if it means anything at all—but I’m saying it anyway because I need you to know it.”
If it means anything at all?
Fucking hell, her love and loyalty meant everything. Absolutelyeverything.
I just couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Couldn’t even say the words back to her, because they were true. And that particular truth, if given a real voice outside my head, would put her in the fucking ground and damn her soul to an eternity of… Fuck, I didn’t even know what.
