How could this have happened? What should he have done differently?
Both of his parents were dead…because of him.
I’m truly alone now, he thought.
No, whispered a voice through a magical bond in his chest.You’re not alone.
Sean lifted his gaze to find that steady green. David’s face remained unlined, his mouth a straight line, but the connection wasnot so stoic. It sprouted new vines, steel-coated, drawing them closer together despite the yards that separated them. The unbreakable tie that bound them held Sean steady, allowed him the room to breathe, to yank himself from the brink of endless grief.
“Til the end?” Sean asked, voice miraculously firm.
David dipped his chin. “Til the bitter, lonely end.”
CHAPTER 42
DAVID
“What the hell happened?” Sean asked later that night. “It’s the one thing I don’t understand. How did they find us?”
David had shut the two of them inside their favorite sitting room, and Sean collapsed onto one of the sofas, his elbows on his knees. It had taken him and Bowenn a full hour of debriefing with the Council before they’d let him free, and in that time, David sensed he’d closed in on himself.
The shattering pain of his emotions was impossible to ignore as it attacked David through both his magic and their connection. The grief and guilt had consumed him, and rightfully so.
Sean’s father had died protecting him.
David, however, chose to play hide-and-seek with this new stark reality, the one where Kywyn didn’t exist. It hadn’t occurred to him that losing Sean’s father would feel the same as losing his own—one he actually cared about and wanted around. The icicles of grief wanted to prick their pointy noses deep into his heart.
He refused.
Denial was a sweet, sweet liquor. Went down far too easy.
“I think,” David said from the sofa opposite, keeping his tone carefully neutral, “it was me.”
Sean looked up, blue eyes heavy. “How?”
“Something happened.” He pressed his palm to his chest, right where his connection to Sean burrowed. “I don’t know. I was fine, and then suddenly…I just wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
David dragged his palms over his face. “It all burst apart. All my walls. All the ice. Years of suppressed emotion. I don’t know. I think it lured them in.”
Sean tilted his head, a slow, pensive gesture. “What triggered it?”
David’s ice had rebuilt nicely, so the flare of panic was a mere flicker inside the glacier. “Isobel.”
“Isobel?” Sean’s tone lifted, surprised. “What did she do?”
Gaze firmly planted on the table between them, David inhaled one slow breath. “She’s…pregnant.”
Silence.
He didn’t need to look at Sean to know he was putting it together—maybe not all of it, butenough.
“I’d felt something,” Sean said after a while. “Just before they showed up. It was like a heart attack.”
David chuckled darkly. “It was a panic attack.”
Another long stretch of stillness descended before Sean blew out a noisy puff of air. “Emotion bait.”
