“I will be completely honest. You changed so much in Slawa, and so much happened, that I forgot it mattered. I’m sorry.”
She hits my chest with a wet sob, then again, until I stumble back from the force of her assault. Jaga grabs me by the collar, and she’s furious now, her soul sizzling red like a storm.
“How could you forget? How could you when I see them in my nightmares every night?”
I sigh, humbled and angry with myself. “I know you so well, poppy girl. So well—in some ways. But you are a goddess to me, and it makes me forget everything mortal about you.”
She hugs herself, curling into a small shape of a woman crushed with guilt and relief. I raise my hands, unsure whether I can touch her, and hover them around her, until the sobs tearing out of her grow so pitiful, I can’t hold back anymore. I pick her up, cradling her in my arms, and walk into the shadows, taking us to the same waterfall where I often sit with Nyja. It’s night here, like always, the only sound being the splash of water. A blue moon hangs high in the sky, a crescent tonight.
Jaga shakes and cries in my arms for a long time, then curls into an even tighter ball, hiccupping from pain.
“What’s wrong, lo… What’s wrong? Please, let me help.”
“I think… Oh… I think I’m bleeding. Oh, damned body. It was fine when I didn’t eat. Let me go, I need to go back, I have a potion that…”
I wrap my shadows around her and pull her pain into me. I become a container for her agony the same way I did for her before, first in her cottage, then under a dying tree. Her torment pulses through me, crushing and horrible, and I welcome it with a sigh. It’s like a balm to the guilt tearing me apart.
Because I could have shown her long ago. I could have alleviated her suffering. But I forgot how much it mattered.
No wonder she doesn’t want me. I am so very bad at loving her.
Chapter thirty-one
Rubies
An hour passes, and I make the most of it. Filled with Jaga’s pain, I hold her close, breathing in her scent, drinking in her warmth. If she let me, I’d lick her blood right from between her thighs, but I don’t dare suggest it.
When she stirs with a sigh, I murmur soothingly, hoping she’ll go back to sleep. But Jaga sits up, straddling my thighs, and looks at me with a strange, new intensity.
“I don’t know what to think,” she confesses in a hoarse whisper, her face discolored and ghostly in the blue light of the moon. “You made Bogna’s husband kill her to punish me, yet Bogna is so happy now. Happier than ever, because she never would have had her children back in the mortal world. So did you do a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I did a both thing,” I say with a huff of amusement. “It was bad because it caused her pain and made you suffer. And it was good, because she’s happy now.”
Jaga shakes her head in frustration. “And the baby? Do I just weigh her happiness against the suffering of her relatives who probably still mourn her, cursing my name? Will that determine if what you did was good or bad?”
I shrug. “I did a bad thing toward her relatives and you. A good thing toward the girl. She’s now free, whether you like it or not. Back in the mortal world, she would have been fodder for Perun, nothing more.”
The deep ache throbs harder as Jaga settles more comfortably in my lap, and I carefully control my expression so as not to betray it. It’s pathetic enough that I’m compelled to do this for her. She doesn’t have to know the extent of my humiliation.
Jaga sighs and grabs my shirt, piercing me with her gaze. I swallow and put my hands on her waist, lightly. She doesn’t push them off.
“You still betrayed me and manipulated me in horrible ways. You chained me to the floor. You let Mokosz take me!”
I nod, because it’s all true. “I did.”
She grunts in fury and lets go, pressing her forehead to mine as her hands fist my hair, not gently.
“You will just do it all over again,” she says, ragged and shaky. “You… I will trust you, I will fall, and then you’ll kick me so I fall harder, right into a pile of glass and blades, and it’s always like this with you, always!”
I exhale deeply and cup the back of her head, angling her closer for a kiss. “That is very likely. I am horrible. The worst.”
She kisses me back with a growl of fury, and we wrestle, lips and tongues twisted in wrath, until she pulls back and shakes her head.
“No! I was doing so well.”
“What, resisting me?” I ask in a joke. “You mean to tell me it’s hard? Please. You have no trouble avoiding me while I pine like a fool.”
“No trouble,” she scoffs, grabbing my shirt again. Her eyes glitter in the moonlight, and she licks her lip, watching my face with indecision.
