Page 81 of Fallacies

I rear back. “Afraid you’ll hurt me?”

“I would never hurt you, Lucina.”

“Then why are you telling me this?” I move to pull my hand away, but he tightens his grip.

“I want to protect you, Lucina. I want to keep you safe. But it feels impossible to do, even more so now, and it feels out of my control. I hate feeling that way.”

The explanation lowers my defenses. Enough that my fingers relax around his.

“I saved you from that fire, but I should have been there when it started. I gave you the antidote to the Ashvine, but I watched you take a stranger’s drink, too jealous to think about anything else but someone else touching you. Then tonight, I saw what I thought was you, cross that fire, just out of my reach, and all I kept thinking was that I’d give the skin off my fucking bones to get you back.” He shakes his head. “And I couldn’t.”

“Callan.”

He gets to his feet, moving like he’s about to start pacing the room. “The thought of you crossing that Ward on your own, Lucina…Of not being there in case something goes wrong…” Callan makes it one step away from the desk before he turns back to face me. “No one has stepped foot in the Estate in over twenty years, and I’m supposed to just let you go alone?”

I blow out a breath. “Yes.”

Callan shakes his head, spinning back around to resume his pacing. “This is fucking insane.”

My gaze falls to my bare feet. “I know.”

“Nobody can cross that ward with you, Lucina.”

“I know that too,” I sigh, picking at a loose thread on the hem of my shirt. It feels like an eternity that I sit, twisting the dark grey string around my pointer finger, suffering in the silence while I wait for him to say something else. It isn’t until I hear his pacing stop and I see the toe of his boots step into my field of vision that I lift my head.

Whatever Callan sees on my face softens his troubled expression. He exhales through his nose, and I feel the breath across my cheeks. For a moment, he just stares, silver eyes darting between my own.

I knew he liked to be in control. I knew he preferred order and rules and managing risks to rewards…I just didn’t know how deep it ran. Honestly, I’m surprised he’s put up with me as long as he has. I wouldn’t say that I’m trouble, but it always seems to find me.

And wherever I am, Callan is too.

Worse even, he takes responsibility for some of the situations I’ve found myself in. The fire, the poison, the stunt I pulled tonight…None of it was his fault. Something tells me I could explain that until I’m blue in the face, but he’d never listen. He’d still be carrying weight that isn’t his.

Taking a step closer, he reaches up to brush a strand of hair out of my face, and I accept the touch willingly, savoring the warmth of his hand against my cheek and the slow brush of his thumb across my cheekbone.

Callan exhales, whispering into the silence, “I wish you would have told me.”

It’s a punch to the gut. I thought knowing it was coming would make it hurt less, but it doesn’t. Swallowing, I nod. “I know.”

But everything I’ve kept from him was withheld for the same reason. The Eldral, my father, Fenton, and my second split. It’s all information that could destroy everything I’ve found on this side of the Barrier. I was terrified—still am. But I didn’t keep it from him out of spite; I kept it from him out of fear, and I’m realizing now that I shouldn’t have been afraid.

I have someone good. Someone who understands. Someone who would never let anything or anyone hurt me.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, but the apology falls flat. It isn’t nearly enough.

Callan nods, and I feel him shrinking away. As if he’d forgotten for a moment what it was I was sorry for, and now, with it all rushing back in, it’s not settling as easily as he wants it to.

My mind is still a mess.

He’s trying, and I can see that. He wants to be okay with this, but whether he loves me or not doesn’t change the fact that he’s lived his whole life loathing the very thing that lives inside me.

Just because he wants to doesn’t mean he can.

It isn’t just Rogue blood pumping through me. It’s magic that ran through my father—the same man who led an army into Streatham and oversaw every horrible thing that happened that night.

My father is the reason Callan grew up without his, and how can I expect him to get over something like that? Love is a powerful emotion, but what if it isn’t strong enough? The situation we’re in is unprecedented. There’s no manual on how to move forward, and there’s no estimate on how long it will take.

This is exactly why I shouldn’t have come in here.