Page 123 of The Silversmith

My gut lurched. I stepped back, away from him, craned my neck up to see the sorrow in his eyes—sorrow that cut through me like jagged ice. Panic consumed him at the sight of my retreat.

“Simeon is not here in Brinnea,” he uttered. “He never was.”

Chapter twenty-nine

Devastating silence settled in my bones. Dread pricked at my heart and my neck as he looked down at me, face and jaw strained tight. I recoiled from him. All of me lost, alarmed and on guard—my stupid heart even more than my sense of self-preservation.

“What do you mean he’s not here?” I stumbled backwards.

“Don’t run.” He caught my wrists before I could fall and nodded towards the beach. “Please. Walk with me.”

But I ripped my wrists from his grasp so hard that the violent friction chafed my skin. It wasn’t smart to turn my back to him, but I did. I tore my heels off my feet and rushed towards the beach. Away from people, away from all the lights, away from him.

“I’m stupid,” I hissed through tearful eyes. “Stupid, stupid, stupid—”

“Ella!” His deep voice was right behind me the moment my feet touched cold sand.

But I turned on him, wielding a heel in one hand. I stumbled again, losing my balance from the cold sand gripping my bare feet. “Simeon’s not here?”

His hand flexed as if to reach for me. “No, but—”

“Were you going to give me up? Is someone…” I looked around, frantic. No one was near us save for a few passing Brinneans distracted by celebration. “Is someone here? Did you make a deal and—”

“No!” Coarse pain rippled through him. “Never.”

“Then I don’t understand—”

“I wanted you. Just you,” he insisted, hands open in supplication. “That morning the temple went down, I was going to tell you the truth, but you said you wanted to go to Brinnea with me, and I am a selfish bastard, Ella,” he gritted out. “I am not the one that gets to have you, not in this life.” His chest shuddered with emotion. “But I couldn’t stay away, and I couldn’t let you go, so I took— I took time, I took these moments with you knowing they’re probably all I’ll ever get.”

“Me,” I breathed, my chest split down the middle—confusion and distrust on one side, hope and love on the other. “You just wanted me?”

“Yes.” Hesitantly, he reached for my hand. My recoil this time was only slight, but I kept my distance. “Are you really that surprised?” He huffed out a breath. “You see how I look at you. You hear me talk to you. When we’re close, when we lie in bed together, you feel how I want you. I gave up trying to hide what I feel for you long, long ago.”

The air around my head began to thin. I wanted to accept it. Go back to dancing, to just being with him, but—

“Did you have something to do with the temple in Tovick?” I demanded shakily. “To—to get me out of there and get me alone?”

His face twisted with pain. “No.”

“You intercepted the others on your way here and you told them Simeon sent you.”

“He did send me. He sent me to retrieve you from Warrich and take you directly to those Caves.”

My stomach plummeted. But it had been Finn who revealed the plan to come to Brinnea, not Gavin.

“You told the others the plan was to go to Brinnea from the beginning, before you even knew me.” The air escaped my chest and left a cavern in its wake. “You would have had this plan before you even came to Warrich.”

“Yes,” he confessed. “I did.”

“There’s a difference between what I’ve been told to do and what I plan on doing.”

I shrunk back from him, remembering some of his first words to me. Words I had been too naïve to question.

“If we hadn’t been in Tovick,” I choked out, “if Caz hadn’t been in Tovick—”

“I know.” Remorse flickered through him. “But those brothers knew what they were signing up for by volunteering to escort you from Warrich back to those Caves. They knew there were risks.”

A gust of wind carried frigid mist off the ocean and sent shivers through me.