My brows scrunch up in confusion. “Ask you what?”
“I want you to ask me those questions that have been on your mind since you woke up. I deserve to hear them. You deserve to voice them. One in particular. Soask me.” His gaze is dark, his tone hard. But not with the fight that I was trying to pick. Not with anger at all. Withanguish.
I suck in a breath. Because right away, I know what he’s referring to.
Thereisone question that’s burned into the back of my mind. I’ve carried the taste of its ash on my tongue, felt the char of its presence seeping down my throat.
Everything between us becomes soheavy. So stretched. A perilous point where there is no soft side to fall on. The longer I stay silent, the more misery saturates Slade’s face. But the question continues to burn. Smoking up my head, raking flames down my spirit.
“Ask. Me.”
One tear. One tear leaks out of me, so hot that I wouldn’t be surprised if it steamed against my cheek.
But I ask.
Looking him in the eye, my own anguish now matching his, I ask the one question I haven’t wanted to. “Where were you?”
When I was drugged.
When I was shoved into that room with Digby.
When my ribbons were slashed, right along with my soul.
When I was propped up on that mezzanine, confused and lost.
“I thought you were going to come. But you didn’t.” My voice is choked, shaken, and every word I say lands a flinch across his face. “So where were you?”
CHAPTER 27
SLADE
Where were you?
It’s the way she says it. The smallest warble in her throat, so tiny that anyone else would miss it. But not me.
When it comes to Auren, I make it a point to notice everything.
So I hear it—the pain. And I know that by initiating her to ask this question, I’m leading her down the path of that night. A night I’m sure she doesn’t want to think about, much less talk about. But we need to.
She looks at me steadily, golden eyes shining almost as much as the blue veins running through the cave. “I thought you were going to come,” she tells me, and the confession bleeds like a wound from her tongue. “But you didn’t.”
I have been beaten. Stabbed. Head held beneath water until my lungs burned. I have been ripped apart by the fury of my power to the point where it felt like my skin was flayed from my body.
But none of that is as painful as hearing those words out of Auren’s mouth.
It’s a physical thing, this culpability. Guilt isn’t a strong enough word for what I feel, for what I carry.
As if it wasn’t enough that I fuckingrotted her,I let her down. And somehow, that’s far worse.
All her damn life, people have let her down. Over and over again, she has put her faith in them, and they have failed her. And then the night when she needed me, that’s exactly what I did.
Failed her.
My mind flashes to that night. The night before it all went to shit. She left my tent, a secret smile curving her plush lips, and all I wanted to do was drag her back in and devour her all over again.
I wish I had.
If only I’d taken her hand and asked her to stay. If only I hadn’t let her go back into that castle.
