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My lips parted to retort, then slammed shut. Because I hadn’t. I’d made up my mind—his mind—for him.
“I meant it, Mags. There was no role, no demand you could make, no price I wouldn’t pay.”
“And now?”
“Now, I’m thinking about all the things I could’ve done differently. All the things I’d change if it meant keeping you. It was my job to make you feel safe enough to stay, and I failed.”
“What if you didn’t fail?”
“I don’t follow.”
“What if destiny really does beckon?”
The corner of his lips twitched. “Explain.”
“What if I never could’ve loved you right? What if I needed to feel the agony of losing you to overcome my shit?”
“I don’t believe God’s punishing us.”
“I don’t mean it like that. I don’t think twelve-year-old you was being punished either. I don’t think you deserved being sold like cattle to protect your sister from the same fate.”
Aren went quiet for a long moment, rubbing a hand slowly up and down my arm as he considered it. “Do you think we were always destined to take the long road home?”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “Like I said, my gods don’t usually speak to me directly. I find them in the painted petals of a flower or the light through the trees.”
“Like Rhiannon guiding us out of there?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Like…” I swallowed hard, fighting the lump in my throat. “Like me clinging to my Guardian as he died in my arms and begging the magic to take me somewhere safe. Somewhere we could get help. And it brought me to you. I thought I was dying, Aren. I thought I was dying, and the last thing my magic did was bring me home. Like it knew you’d help him before I understood the full weight of what I was asking. And you did.”
“Ally—”
“I didn’t say you wanted to. I said you did it.” I tilted my chin, searching for familiar constellations only to realize… this wasn’t the same night sky we had at home. This was something other. Entirely new shapes taking form above us. “Do you regret it? Saving him? After… after Ally?”
“Ally was always going to be the one to take the blade. It didn’t matter how willing the rest of us were to do the same—in every circumstance, she engineered things so the most people she loved stayed safe. Maybe it would’ve been different if she’d never lost Michael. Like Lana seems to be, it was almost as though she was looking for a reason to follow him. I’m not certain it ever truly settled in that he came back.”
“I’m not sure that answers the question.”
“Doesn’t it?” He took a breath so deep it was as though he was preparing to submerge in the sea, bracing for the absence of air. “She and Ansel always had this… unspoken pact between them. None of us could dissuade it. Should either fall into a situation worse than death, the other would fight to grant it. Should death threaten those they love, it was their shields, their bodies between us and him. It doesn’t shock me that they both held true to their convictions until the last breath.”
“You act like she’s not coming home.”
“We barely spent twenty-four hours in that maze of thorns and even Jason and I started slipping.”
He didn’t say the rest. He didn’t have to. Moros had his claws in her for nearly five months. Whatever remained of his second was likely a very different specter from the woman we’d lost.
A shower of meteors flew overhead, and he took up a steady stroke over my back. After a while, Aren breathed, “I just have to believe that she’ll always come home, and this won’t be any different. In this life or the next, she’ll find her way back to us, and we’ll put each other back together. So will Ansel.” Aren groaned, “And they’ll likely be just as muleheaded as every other incarnation and my job will be to spend the next five centuries keeping the fuckers alive and making sense of her riddles. And I’ll be damn glad to do it.” He took another steadying breath. “Beyond that… she said to kill him was as good as killing Blythe. Only in his survival did we guarantee her return. She comes home, and I keep you. She doesn’t, and you fade too. So no, little dove, despite the complications he creates simply by existing, I do not regret sparing him.”
My throat thickened and my eyes watered. I composed myself before sniffling. My mate would sooner prioritize my sister’s safe return than his own well-justified vengeance. He’d put me before justice. “I love you.”
“Hmm,” he hummed contentedly. “That’s… good for me. Be a damn shame… if it was one-sided after all that.”
I snorted, rolling my eyes as his words slowed. “It was never one-sided.”
“Still… It’s nice to hear.” Aren gently tucked me beneath his chin and rolled us to the side, a muscled leg settling over my hips. “I love you too, Magnolia Green.”
In the next breath, his breathing slipped into the steady cadence of sleep, and I smiled against him, wishing we were home where I could peel off his shirt and feel the soft curls of his chest hair, the smooth skin beneath.
Sleeping exposed in the heart of The Middle, beside two wards dripping dark magic, should’ve been impossible. But I drifted back off in the cage of Aren’s arms into a blissful, dreamless sleep… until the horrifyingly familiar thud of enormous wings tore me back into consciousness.
