“You wouldn’t have me any other way.”
“Maybe in the next world, I’ll make you less of an asshole.” I shift to face him again so he can see my little smirk. “I’m the one who makes the wish, after all.”
“That you will be.” He runs a finger along my jaw, and I fight a shiver.
“Kaelis.” I put weight behind his name so he knows I’m serious. Kaelis tilts his head, shifting away slightly to get a better look at me. “No more secrets.”
“What more could I possibly be keeping from you? You already know my deepest secret.”
I draw a breath and ready myself. How he handles thisquestionwill tell me everything—how serious he is about letting me in, and the depth of his feelings for me. I drag my hand up his stomach and place it on the center of his chest, feeling his strong heartbeat.
“Tell me, what really happened to Clan Hermit?”
Chapter 69
After a long minute of him just staring at me, Kaelis finally says, “You know, you have the worst pillow talk of any of the lovers I’ve ever taken.”
“How many lovers have you taken?” I narrow my eyes slightly and tilt my head.
“Suddenly jealous?”
“Not in the slightest.” I glance away. “I thought you were devoted to me, is all.”
“Liar.” He brings my face back to his with a finger and kisses me gently. “Two.” He grips my hand over his heart. “The first when I was far too young—barely fifteen. I didn’t even know what love was yet. We hardly did anything that could constitute as ‘lovers’ in the sense most people mean. I was clumsy and more curious than passionate.
“The second was in the year after I went before the Chalice. In my mind, I had lost my destiny, and I tried to drown myself in the arms of another to see if I could forget the way you looked, the way you smelledand sounded, even as you haunted my dreams.” Ravin’s jabs about Kaelis drowning in the arms of someone else take on new meaning. “Obviously, it made everything worse.”
The sincerity is potent. My fingers lace around his.
“You know the extent of my lovers,” I say.
“Liam only?”
I nod.
“Was I better than him?”
I howl with laughter.Out of everything he could ask.“Now who’s jealous?”
Kaelis merely smirks.
“Yes,” I say. “Obviously.”
“Good, then I can now die peacefully.”
“No dying.” I tighten my grip on him slightly. “Now, about Clan Hermit…”
“I would gladly perish to avoid this discussion if I could.” He sighs heavily, staring up at the canopy of his bed. His fingers still clutch mine tightly, fingertips caressing the knuckles he kissed at the start of all this. “I’m sure you can put everything together.”
“I want to hear it from you.” I shift, working to catch his eyes.I need to know if you killed innocents in cold blood.“Tell me, just once. Then I promise we will never speak about it again, unlessyouwant to.”
Kaelis’s eyes return to the canopy, and he does nothing but stare for a long, long moment. When he speaks, his voice is distant and detached.
“I can’t tell you when the visions started; what I can tell you is that they were nightmares first. Then reality seemed…fluid, for a time. There were moments when I was a boy where I would be walking the halls of the castle at Fate Hearth and, for a second, it felt like I was somewhere else—like I wassomeoneelse.”
The way he pauses sends a chill through my soul. For a moment, there’s a shift in his eyes. A flicker of something haunted and unnatural.
“I didn’t know it then, but in those glimpses…I walked thesehalls. It wasn’t until I came here that I recognized that what I saw weren’t dreams, or nightmares, or madness, but memories of a sort. I came here, and I saw…her.” A sigh, wistful and short. “Portraits on the walls. Her profile in the tapestries. The moment I laid eyes on my mother, I knew it in my very soul. She was the one who led me here, back to the home I should have grown and thrived in.”
