Page 57 of Season Warriors & Wolves

Her hands rested on my back, hesitantly at first. “Malik,” she whispered onto my chest, holding me tighter.

When she melted entirely to me, I took her in—that maddening scent of honey and peach, so damn sweet. I hated sweetness. I hated every cursed sweet flavour and smell.

“Did he hurt you,” she asked quietly, head still buried in my chest. “Elias said that—”

“No.”

She finally lifted her head from where she had hid it and raised a hand to the scars in my left eye. The more she stared at me, the more the frown she wore deepened.

“Don’t go falling in love with me, little bird.”

“Idi—”

I put a hand over her mouth to shut her up and locked my arm tightly around her neck till she was wiggling around like a goose in a net.

“Let me go! Malik!”

“Mal,” I said in her ear, and she sucked in a sharp breath. “Mal, not Malik. Call me Mal. You know ten ways to end me in one second, you should probably start calling me that.” Twirling her around, I pinched her chin between my fingers. “How about now you tell me how you put your back side in serious danger.”

“My back side is fine.”

“It better be.”

Her eyelids faltered and she evaded my gaze, lifting something between us. “Aunt Ada wanted me to give you this. I helped her write it sometime after you and Snow were taken.” She swallowed, finally looking up at me again. “I’m sorry.”

I swiped my thumb under her eye, wiping the warm teardrop pooling under her dark lashes. “She was sick, Thora. It would have happened eventually.”

“Wouldn’t you have wanted to be there for her?”

“It happened for the best that I wasn’t.”

Even through her dark fringe I could tell her brows were bunching with confusion. “Malik, you can’t say that.”

“There are a few deaths that I never wish to feel, bird,” I said, raising my fingers to her brow to push away the short hair covering them. “Hers was one of them.” The way my truths slipped away like butter before her made me want to stay as far away from her as possible. “My last memory of her would have remained the most prominent since death is the most we feel as humans—all emotions at once and yet nothing at all.”

Her full rosy lips parted open. “At…at lake Asterin…with Kilian, you said you felt him die,” she breathed, her emerald eyes pacing between mine, looking for denial more than an answer.

I sighed, realising how much too much I had told her—confided in her. “You should have at least brought me a bottle of liquor as a warm welcome if you were going to pester poor me with questions you already know the answers to.”

“Is that what you are going to do? Drink it away?”

“No one says anything when you just think it away like it is all supposed to be sunshine and rainbows if you just forget it ever rained.”

My ears buzzed at the silence that followed.

She winced a little, stepping back and away from me. Though I could finally breathe without being suffocated in sweetness, the air tasted too stale now in my lungs. “You’re right, I am sorry.”

No.

No, that was not what I meant to say. It all came out wrong.

What I meant to say was that I envied her. That I was so envious of her, I envied how she could forget because I couldn’t. I envied how she was able to paint blue over grey, how she still tried even if her tears ruined the canvas. I envied how she could be afraid of what scared her because I could not. I envied her smiles because I still kept feigning mine and they looked nothing as bright or warm or true as hers even though she lied, too—she lied so much. I envied that she was this small thing that dared to feel so much though she’d never been shown how to, but I was emotion itself and yet I didn’t feel a bit. Sometimes not at all.

I grabbed her wrist as she was about to turn and leave, the apology at the tip of my tongue—the one apology I promised to never make when I found a fix for my issues. The same apology no one in all my years had ever tempted me to make. “You could join me. I’ll come to your room like before. You know I like your sofa more than my bed.”

Slowly, she peeled my fingers from her skin. All too often I forgot how she hated to be touched and how much I wanted to do it. “I’ve been staying in Olympia for some time now,” she said, rubbing where I’d held her. “And I will not sit and watch, let alone participate in ruining someone I care for.”

Chapter seventeen