The words never made it to my lips. I swallowed, something in me screaming that if I said the words aloud, they’d be used against me by those trying to break me apart.
“Dahlia—”
“I watched you die a thousand times,” I blurted out. “I heard you call out my name. Sometimes, it was me wielding the knife as you lay cut to pieces at my feet. Other times, it was you, slicing yourself to bits as I watched.”
My hands quavered as I reached for him, shaken by the still lingering images of his demise. He turned his hand over, palm facing upwards, and let me weave my fingers through his, relishing in his human warmth.
“You are trembling as if that is not all he showed you,” Vidar whispered somberly.
“No. No, that is not all. It’s all fading, though. It will be a shadow of what it was soon and—”
“Do not keep things from me.”
I lifted my eyes to meet his and I saw a captain staring back, giving me an order. No secrets. No lies. We’d promised.
“You had a hand in the torture,” I confessed. “Many times.”
His face did not change. He was not a stupid man, Vidar. And he certainly was not dense when it came to me. He could read me better than I could read myself at times and he knew. I knew he did.
“What did I do?”
“All manner of things with a blade,” I confessed. “All manner of things with your cock. Your hands. Your words. Your mouth.”
“Fuck,” he cursed, pulling his hand away to scrub his face.
“I think it angered him the most that he could never fool me for long.”
“I should not have let it go on so long.”
“Vidar,” I said, leaning forward and lifting my hand to cup his jaw. “I am grateful that you did not want to kill me. I am even more grateful that you did. There is no other that could have made that choice.”
“If Aleksi could not have brought you back—"
“Then I would have been free either way,” I said, a tear sliding down my cheek. “And I would be thanking you from whatever afterlife there is for me.”
Vidar was quick to catch it with his thumb, his calloused fingers caressing my face.
“I cannot make that choice again. My heart, as you’ve said before, is not made of bone. For you, it is unprotected.”
“You will not have to make that choice again.”
“Seeing you like that… I’ve never felt so powerless in my life. The hunter I once was was in ruins. I was not fearless. I was a mess and the men saw it. I cannot fall apart like that again.”
I leaned in a bit closer, my lips brushing lightly over his. I could still taste subtle hints of hemsbane, but it had faded since last our lips touched.
“If ever you should feel powerless again,” I whispered. “Remember that you, Vidar, have managed to make a god jealous.”
He gripped my chin between his fingers. “Because your heart is mine.”
“My heart. My soul. All of me.”
We returned to a camp full of men scattered around on blankets trying to sleep. Meridan was sitting alone by a fire, her knees hugged to her chest as she gaped into the flames. I could still see a thousand terrible things happening to her body, but awake, I realized Akareth had gotten it all wrong. He didn’t know what they sounded like. Even using my memories, he could not get it completely accurate and I took some solace in that.
When she saw us emerging from the dark, she shifted as if she wanted to stand, but she refrained. Instead, I went to her.
“You should sleep,” I said to her. “I know you well and I doubt you did much of that these past couple of days.”
“I did very little,” she confessed.
