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I should’ve hidden better. I wanted to keep her safe, but I'm too raw to speak to her, to be close to her in any way.
Yet, I stay rooted in place, watching the swing of her hips as she comes toward me. My heart is in my throat. My mind is spinning through all the possible things she might say when she reaches me. It clearly isn't that she regrets fucking that fae and refusing to be our mate, so what is it?
“Dusk.” Her voice is soft, a touch, a reminder of a memory that she wasn’t even in. My mind flashes back to a woman with long white hair and a smile she rarely gave. Then on the body dragged from the moat, the one I couldn't bear to look at closely. One of my clearest memories is of her long white hair flowing around her in the water. Of her still, dead corpse.
We lost our woman then, just like we're doing now. But the outcome this time will be different, although the heartache will be the same. The wreckage. The utter destruction. But even worse because this is our mate. Even worse because losing one’s mate is something that is impossible to move past.
"Listen..." she begins again, but she doesn't sound like she knows what she plans to say.
And I realize that I can’t hear her words because I’ll break. I have to stop her.
Whether she leaves now or later, it’s going to destroy us. “Stop talking.” I sound angry, which is better, infinitely so, than the sadness burning through me. “If you’re going to go, do it.”
Her eyes flicker. She’s so fucking upset, so hurt it pains me to look at her. It pains me to see what this is doing to her on our behalf. She’s not doing this on purpose and my heart knows it. Hell, even my fucking head knows it. But the rage inside of me, the part of our father that always exists in Phantom and I needs an outlet.
“I don’t want to leave you when you guys need me.”
I scoff. I laugh because I know it’s going to hurt her and none of us are going to be okay. “We don’t fucking need you.”
“What about the prophecy?”
“Were you thinking about the prophecy when you were with him?” Jealousy isn’t an emotion I’m good at. “When you were on top of him with his dick inside you, were you thinking about the prophecy?”
She shakes her head and looks down. “No.”
“So why do you give a fuck now?” I hate talking to her this way. Hate feeling any of this shit.
She doesn’t answer with more than a loud exhale through her nose.
“That’s right. We got along before you came here and we’re going to get along after.”
The surprising shove against my chest is enough to make me stumble. The grunt from in her throat is half scream, half anguished bellow. She’s angry. It’s in her eyes, her voice, her stance. The way she stomps away.
I sit at the edge of the river and watch her go. It’s probably going to be the last time I see her, the last time I get a whiff of her natural scent in all its flowery goodness. I touch the scar on my chest where she healed me. It’s red. Puckered. Not painful, though. She took that away for me.
Once upon a time I thought my father’s betrayal was the worst thing we would ever have to survive. I thought nothing could hurt inside me worse than that. But I was wrong. This is way worse than that. Partly because a king betrays to keep his throne. It’s historical in the human world, in every world. The dark things they do to keep their power are the things no one ever talks about, the things that haunt dreams, what nightmares are made of.
But Ann leaving us… this will annihilate Phantom. He won’t bounce back this time. For all I know, I’ll be lighting the pyre for him. And Onyx just learned to trust again. He took a leap for her. He worked so hard to overcome his fears of love, of caring.
And even if they somehow survive what she’s done, her betrayal, we’re toast. Dead. Because of the prophecy. Because we couldn’t fulfill our part and she refused to fulfill hers. She goes, we die. It’s over. And there isn’t a fucking thing we can do to stop it.
I wish I could find solace knowing she might leave and find happiness with her fae, but I must be a selfish bastard because the thought only makes the pain in my chest worse.
SEVEN
Ann
When I leftDusk at the river, I walked. I cried. I cursed and stomped my feet like a child. It was all pretty pointless, I knew that. I knew that if I wasn't me, I'd slap myself for being such a mess. But since I am me, I had to just work through my feelings until I got to a strangely numb point, then head back home.
Now, I’m standing at the mouth of the cave looking in. Only Rayne is inside, sitting facing a fire that crackles and sends embers rising into the air. He doesn't notice me at first, just stares into the fire like it'll give him the answer to the things in life he doesn't understand, probably me. But it's strange to me; as I look at him, it's not at all like looking at someone else. It's like this is Rayne and has always been Rayne, which is an unexpected sentiment.
Not that anything has been normal since he died.
I want to walk in and let him hold me, let him absorb the pain of my chat with Dusk. Let his heart speak to mine. But I can’t. Instead, I go to the fire and sit on Phantom’s bedroll, gazing into the fire and letting the heat lull me into a fake kind of peace, one that calms my visceral reactions but does nothing for the aches in my emotional heart.
There won’t be true peace until I figure out how I’m supposed to feel and what I’m supposed to do. There’s nothing in the handbook about what to do when a soulmate inhabits a new body and comes back after the situation has changed, after acceptance has been achieved, after the moving on has progressed.
And what progress it is. But I can’t think about them now, either. It’ll drive me mad.
