“It was about not losing you without a fight.Because you’re worth fighting for.”
He saw his words move through her face in stages, the way real things settled when they finally found their target, and he felt it move through the bond that had always been between them, at the same time, a low, ringing note he had not heard from her in longer than he could measure.Something in her steadied at the words.Something else came undone.He could not have said which one of the two cost her more.
“You pushed me away.And then I chose to walk away,” she said, more quietly now.
“I know.”It hurt to admit those words.But he’d been wrong all those decades and decades ago.He shouldn’t have pushed or pulled.He should have given her time and room to grow.He should have encouraged her and cheered her on as she blossomed into the warrior and woman she’d become.
“And you’re saying you would have, what, stopped me?”
“Yes and no,” he admitted.“I would have not given you a reason to walk away in the first place.”
He gave it to her without hesitation.He gave it to her without apology.He had owed her that answer for centuries, and there was nothing in him left that wanted to dress it up.
Her breath caught.“Regardless, that’s not your choice to make.”
“No,” he agreed.
He let the silence sit for a beat.He let her hear the next part before he spoke it.“But it was mine to try.Instead, I destroyed what was between us.I hurt you.And then I blamed you formypain.”
The space between them tightened.Not physically.He could not have closed it any further than he already had, not without permission.What tightened was something deeper, the thread that ran from his chest to hers and had run there since the first time she had ever turned and looked at him over her shoulder with a sharp word on her tongue and a worse one waiting behind it.The kind of tension that didn’t come from conflict.The kind that came from being seen.
“You don’t get to show up centuries later and act like this still matters,” she muttered.
“And you don’t get to pretend it doesn’t,” he answered evenly.
Her eyes flashed up to his, dark and bright at once.“Of course, you’d say that.”
A beat of silence.He let it fill.
“Why now?”she asked.
He felt the question settle in him with more weight than he expected.It was the same question he’d been asking himself.He held her gaze.He let his hand drift the smallest fraction closer to her cheek, his thumb hovering near the corner of her jaw without touching, and he gave her the only honest answer he had left.
“Because for the first time,” he said quietly, “you’re ready to listen.”
Her breath hitched.
For a second, only a second, she didn’t deny it.
He watched something move behind her eyes then that he hadn’t put there.Another face surfaced in her expression, the steady, patient kind of presence that anchored her in a way he had never been allowed to.He felt the flicker of it across the bond before she shut it down, and he felt the sharp, twisting heat of her guilt chase it.She hated it.He could see her hating it.Her jaw worked once and her eyes dropped from his for the first time since the vision had snapped away.
He knew her enough to know she hated this moment for existing.She hated him for being the cause of it.She hated, most of all, that she had not stepped back.
He was not going to apologize for any of it.Not this time.
“You’re not making this easier,” she said.Her voice came out lower, rougher around the edges.
Shade shrugged.“I’m not trying to.”He’d decided there was no point in not being honest with her.If he had any hope of being what she needed, then he had to swallow his pride and be what she needed.Not whathe thoughtshe wanted.
She scoffed.“Of course, you’re not.”But still she did not move.
He watched her not move.He watched her hand stay at her elbow.He watched her weight stay where it was and her breath come a fraction shallower than it had been a minute before, and he held his own hand exactly where it had been, an inch from her skin, an inch from the rest of his life.
Neither of them moved.
The Nushtonia hummed around them, satisfied for now, and the silence between them held the shape of a question that neither of them was ready to answer out loud.
CHAPTER11
