AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No, my love,” he said, and somehow the translator caught his undertone of sorrow. “I am not leaving these caverns again. This is my home.”
Well. Then.
“Okay,” I said, shaking my head and shifting gears. “We can make this work. I’ve always wanted to get away from the paparazzi, and frankly, if some of those dudes get their heads cut off by those monsters we were eating, that’d be fine by me? Soooo, yeah,” I said, looking around and dusting my hands off. “We can do this.”
Nia’n’an caught my hands and stilled them. “No, my love. I mean this is my final home. And where I am going, you cannot come with me.”
I glared absolute fire at him. “You. Have got. To be kidding me.”
He let go of me and then made a very human gesture, raking his hands up against his scalp, where he didn’t have any hair. “I wish I were, Sloane.”
“But—you’re better now!” I said, pointing around at our surroundings. “Look, you’re already decorating, and?—”
“This is my death nest.”
I pouted strongly enough to make future plastic surgeons quake. “The fuck it is.”
“It is, my love,” he said again. And even as he talked to me, his abdomen kept daubing bits of silk down, and his rear most sets of leg stringing it.
I didn’t want to know what was going to happen when he was through.
“I am so sorry, my love. But we were never meant to be,” he said, pulling me against him, holding me tight.
“That’s bullshit, Nia’n’an.”
“You know it’s true, my love. You heard the that man; I imagine I could hear your father,” he said, making a sound like a soft laugh, “and more importantly, I have heard you.”
I took a horrified gasp, when I realized the entirety of everything Nia’n’an had been forced to listen to. Every time I was worried I was going to come around him, every time I tried to talk sense into myself—even when we’d been hanging up in the cavern, and I’d felt the need to make ashitty joke, because sex with a new person was always goofy.
“Only at first!” I protested. “Because I didn’t want to lose control of myself! But none of that ever had anything to do with you!”
“It does not matter, Sloane. I wish it did,” he said, gathering one of my hands up to place on his chest. My fingers felt the gouges our dinners had left on him—and more recently the bullets—as fresh tears welled up in my eyes.
“How long do you have?”
“Soon. But these things are not precise. Which is why you should go, now, and leave me. The minotaur is a good friend. He will take you home.”
“But I don’t have a home, without you. I love you, Nia’n’an.”
The second I said the words, my voice cracked and I started sobbing. He picked me up and soothed me and I wondered what kind of horrible personIwas to be needing comforting onhisdeathbed.
“I’m not leaving you. I’m not,” I said, clinging to him fiercely. “I haven’t finished my song yet.”
He stroked his head against my temple. “Then sing it for me now, my love, and I will listen to it for as long as I am able.”
Thirty-Seven
NIA’N’AN
Her tiny bodyshuddered against me in her sorrow, and I thought no one else on the planet had ever found a mate so perfect.
She loved me, and I loved her.
Why was that not enough?
Only the Great Mother could say.
But I moved to cradle her in my arms and rested myself down carefully, so that we were in my final web’s tightly woven silk together. Her voice started off thready and thick with tears, but then quickly began to pick up strength and volume.
