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Cold.
Empty.
No. No, it couldn’t have just been a dream. He was real. I’d tasted him. I imagined I still could on my tongue. The soreness in my body should have been proof that it was nothing more than a silly fear, but when I sat up…
The room was empty.
My chest tightened with panic. I summoned a robe of vines with half a thought, wrapping it around myself as I ran from the bed to the bathroom. Empty, too. Cole’s scent lingered in the air. I honed in on it, feeding it to my panicked wolf.
I chased his scent through the halls, moving in short leaps as my magic moved me entire hall lengths in seconds. Awareness tugged at my chest the further I went, the twinkling sensation almost familiar. It grew stronger as I went higher and higher through the castle.
I found Cole on the roof.
His back was to me, though he couldn’t have missed my arrival. Hishair had been ruined in Tartarus. The rest of his body had healed in a single day in Hell, but if he wanted his old hair back, it would take magic. He’d slipped on a familiar ensemble of black pants and a black silk shirt. On the roof, in the dawning hours of the day, I could almost imagine we were back at the other castle. The one that had been just for us, where he’d trained me and we’d sparred, verbally as often as physically. That castle had been home. The first I’d ever had.
Anguish surged in my throat. We didn’t have that castle anymore. Didn’t have the safety he’d indulged me with. When life had been as simple as learning how to reach my wolf and grow stronger physically.
But none of that had been real. We were trapped in a game that started thousands of years ago. The ignorance Cole had left me with had been a gift, a way to shelter me from this burden, but it had been an illusion.
An illusion that shattered when I’d seen him swallowed by the pits. A fate I’d fought against a hundred years ago, though even now the details remained unclear.
“You left me.” The words were a whisper.
He didn’t turn. I surged toward him, inches from his back.
“You weren’t there when I woke up.” My hands curled into fists against his back in anger. Still, he didn’t turn, and I slammed against him, desperate to make him turn and face me. “You left me, you left me, you left me!” I knocked my fists against him with every word. “How could you leave me?”
My voice cracked, and I was asking about more than just this morning.
Forgive me for leaving you all alone. A paltry apology for ripping my heart out.
At last, he turned.
The look on his face devastated me.
Self-loathing was carved into every pane of his face.
“What changed?” I fought to keep the tears that welled in my eyes from falling. I wanted to be angry, not to see my own emotions reflected back. “Why did you leave this morning?”
“I left you there.”
Not in the bedroom. The hollow sound of his voice could only mean the pits.
“A hundred years ago, I left you there,” he repeated. “My wife went to the vilest place in our universe, and was brutally tortured for what would’ve felt like millennia, and I didnothing.”
“You left mehere,” I accused. “Not a lifetime ago. You abandoned me.”
“There was no choice.”
“There’s always a choice.” I slammed my palms into his chest, his back hitting the battlement. “You could’ve told me! We could’ve found a solution.”
“Oh, like we did last time?” A hundred years of bitterness coated the words.
“Maybe!” I snapped. “You didn’t even give me a chance. You just… You gave up and left me.”
“And what’s the alternative, Avery? Do you think I would ever let you go back to that place? Never again.Never,” he snarled.
“The alternative is that you stop being so angry over the past for a moment and justtalkto me. Don’t disappear on me, Cole. Not after this.”
