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Just as he’d done the previous nights. Yet she had not expected the same on her wedding night.
Elina slid her foot up the back of his thigh, trying to puzzle through it. She was utterly satisfied and yet…well, truthfully, she’d thought to feel more than his finger inside her. “I cannot decide whether you’ve been attempting a bizarre method of putting a baby in through my navel, or if there was a ghost squashed between us and you were fucking her instead.”
Warrick choked. Then he burst out with a great laugh, his head hanging, his shoulders shaking.
Her own laugh joined his, utterly surprised and delighted that she’d made him…that she’d made him…
Her laughter died. Her heart shriveled.
“No, Elina. Do not—!” Urgently Warrick caught her when she tried to roll out from beneath him, tried to rip her hand from the ribbon. His eyes were dark, his expression anguished as his fingers tightened around hers, locking their palms together, stopping her from escaping the ribbon’s bond. “Do not unmarry me, Elina, I beg you. Listen to me. Listen. I intended to speak with you this night. You—”
“Liar!”
Her eyes and throat burned with unshed tears. But she was not going to cry on this day. She was not.
Not over him.
“I spoke no lies.” He pinned her body with the massive strength of his. “I sought the truth.”
“The truth of what? Never have I lied to—”
“Not you. About you. And the curse. Elina—”
“What truth do you wish to know? That I puke until I spit blood? That every joint in my body aches even while I’m lying in bed? That—”
“You aren’t cursed.” He hissed fiercely through his teeth. “You aren’t cursed, Elina! You’ve been poisoned.”
She stilled. Wildly her gaze searched his face. He met her eyes unwaveringly, his expression hard and intense. As if he wanted nothing more than to make her believe him. But how could she believe? How?
“Elina.” His voice gentled. “My wife. My heart is yours. My life is yours. My axe is yours. Do not fight me now. Let me fight for you.”
Her body was shaking. “Who?”
“Chardryn.”
“No.” Elina shook her head, the tears she’d fought spurting from her eyes. “No.”
“Mayhap I’m wrong.” But his expression said that he didn’t believe it.
“Tell me.” The command scraped from her raw throat.
“The doxweed is not—”
“No.” The curse, her poisoning, it was nothing. She’d known not to trust anyone. But she’d trusted him. “Why did you pretend not to understand?”
He sighed heavily. “That was nothing to do with you. It began in the prison—delaying the search for the people we’d freed.”
“We?”
“Bannin. A friend. He made certain they sailed, then killed Lord Gleris.”
“Good,” she whispered.
He grunted his agreement. “When you came to my cell, the warden already believed I could not understand him. It would have been foolish to reveal that I could then.”
“Yes. But after?”
“As soon as we met again, you were taken by the mudbeast—and when I breathed into your mouth, I tasted the bloodbane.”
“Bloodbane?”
“The poison. So I continued the pretense to discover who had done it, and why you were made to believe it a curse. People speak unguardedly when they believe you do not understand.”
“As I did,” she said bitterly. “I was a fool to trust you.”
His face whitened into a bleak mask. A muscle in his jaw flexed, as if he intended to speak and only ended up clenching his teeth. Silently he stared down at her, his throat working as he swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed again.
She had done the same before, when trying to dislodge a painful lump of emotion in her throat. Now, witnessing his struggle, she had one, too. And a horrible ache in her chest where her heart had been, seeing how her words had sliced him so deeply.
Why was his pain hurting her?
“I have wronged you.” The words came out so thick and guttural, it was as if Warrick had swallowed them, too. He raised shaking fingers to her face, but did not touch her before clenching his hand and drawing it away. “I only meant to discover who was poisoning you, and then to save you. I had not intended to hurt you—but that is what I did. So I will make it right.”
Make it right. That, she believed he would do. From all that Elina knew of him, of the ghost he’d seen and his actions then, he would make right a wrong.
She closed her eyes. Breathed deep. Tried to look past the emotions crushing her chest. He truly did have good reason for the deception in the prison. And after realizing she was being poisoned, he’d had good reason to continue the pretense.
“I just…I wish that you had told me that you understood.” She sighed. “But then I would have made you tell me why you were pretending.”
“I knew not what you would do. I knew not if you would trust me, or if you would speak of the poison to someone and place yourself in danger if they feared discovery.”
