Page 32 of The Last War We Ever Fought

Her chest rose and fell with a deep breath, and his eyes dropped there. “A very self-destructive hobby,” she calmly said even though she nervously fiddled with a wavy strand of hair on her shoulder.

“Is that why my heart aches?”

Rowan stilled. Her eyes locked tightly on a spot on her thin tent walls. Even her chest wasn’t moving any more. She had stopped breathing entirely.

Part of Elijah liked that. Perhaps she would know just a little how he felt all the damn time. Part of him was too afraid to know her truth—that she didn’t look at every sunrise like he did, hoping he’d be able to see just a glimpse of her again.

Rowan licked her lips, and hoarsely said, “I’m sure there are a thousand women who’d throw themselves at you in this camp alone without stressing your head to come up with such intricate persuasions.”

“Then throw yourself at me.”

He’d stunned her again. “Why? Because I remind you of her?”

“Yes,” he lied, the words so strange in his mouth, resonating like a pebble dropping inside an empty room.

Her lifeless gaze turned deeper, darker, endless as it bore onto his. “What was her name?”

“I cannot tell you for I cannot speak her name to you.”

“Why?”

“The fates want it so. It is my curse.”

“Turmoil and tranquil. War and—” She stood up, sitting at the edge of her bed as she looked up at him. “Peace?” She shook her head and scoffed, incredulity filling her expression. It was the most amused he’d seen her. “It can’t be this childish.”

“Childish?”

“War fell in love with Peace?”

“I never said I was in love with her.”

There was a pause. She wanted to ask him, Elijah could see it, sense it, forebode it. But the storm never came despite the turbulence.

He wouldn't have been able to tell her anything but the truth.

The truth that he was in love with her.

The truth that despite the many lifetimes he’d lived and seeked her, this one had felt like the first ever time. Elijah almost felt guilty. For having loved her in this life more than any other.

But their meetings before had been short. In every lifetime he’d watch her die not long after he’d found her, they had simply not had the time to find profoundness—he’d barely had the time just to see her. In this one, she’d already been dead a long while before he came. He couldn’t understand how he could love her in death. How could he fall for such a lifeless, soulless thing.

“Ask whatever you are meaning to ask,” he said.

“I don’t want to. I don’t want to know.” Those emerald soulless eyes drew darker, more haunted. “I’ve done heinous, vile things, but this feels the most sickening of all.”

“What is?”

“Taking a dead woman’s place.”

“You would want to?”

She was suddenly panting, such chaos in her features pulled taunt with a mix of emotions Elijah could tell apart so easily—fear, confusion, disgust, spite, hatred, desire. Only one of them was left when she rolled her eyes to him again. “I forget that you are supposed to be a horrible man, too.”

“Supposed?”

“You do a terrific job at disguising it behind this charming persona you put up.”

His mouth twitched. “Charming?”