Chapter Nine
Ophelia
I never stoodacross a chasm from Malakai before he left, but entering our suite to find him in the foyer, hands braced against the wooden table, knuckles turning white with the force, that was how I felt.
“I’m sorry,” I started, voice trembling with restraint. “We shouldn’t have insisted on the tattoos tonight.”
Malakai shook his head and released a dark laugh. “That’s not it.” For a moment, he could barely hold himself together: arms locked, eyes closed, words he wasn’t sure he should share bursting his seams.
“What’s going on, then?”
“What’s going on?” he echoed, squeezing his hands tighter before pushing back, striding toward me. “What’s going on is that I have no fucking cluewhat’s going on. No idea what I’m supposed to be doing. Why am I here? What’s the point of any of this? These strategies you’re constantly speaking of, these meetings, this entire life? I don’t want any of it.”
His anger barreled down at me, and I snapped. “I’m not forcing you to do anything.”
“You’re making choices I don’t understand.” It wasn’t what was bothering him—not entirely. I could tell that much from his frantic search for something—anything—to say. But it gave us something to latch on to. So, I did.
“Why do you need to?” I roared.
Seeing Aird had rattled me, and that fury bled into this fight now,but I couldn’t stop it. I unleashed all the fear and uncertainty I’d bottled up as the fight we’d been suppressing for days sprang back open, a force stronger than the both of us.
“Why can’t you just believe in me, Malakai? You always used to.”
“A lot has changed since then, hasn’t it?”
We were across that chasm, screaming to each other, voices adrift in the wind. On entirely different drafts. His arguments carried north and mine south, neither destined to reach the other, and that burned me up.
“Can’t you simply have faith in me?” I asked, palms open to catch the accusations hurled between us. “Can’t you see all I’ve done without you and believe I know what I’m doing?”
Once, we wouldn’t have had to explain ourselves. Support had been a pillar of us, but we’d changed. I shut out the possibilities of what that meant.
“Like you did with me?”
“Don’t you dare,” I snapped. “Don’t youdarecompare our actions right now.” He’d hidden a world of betrayals from me, allowed me to break beneath the sharpened points of their blades again and again. And I was trying to balance healing and proving myself, crumpling under the combined weight, fighting to reach him.
“No, I will compare it. Because you seem to forget that everything I suffered and every lie I told was for a reason. It was to save lives, to saveyou.” A ripple of agitation rolled through him, but he shook his shoulders out, stifling his memories.
“I never asked you to save me, Malakai. If you truly saw me, you’d understand that.” I stalked toward him, anger slowing my steps to a prowl. “You’d know I’d rather have suffered beside you, knowing the truth, than lived in ignorance forever.”
Malakai ran a hand along his chin, palm scraping across that scar from his father. “You’re so focused on whatyouwant—are you even grateful for the sacrifices I made?”
That accusation slammed into me with the force of the Angels descending.
You don’t make the decisions here, Malakai.
Perhaps you shouldn’t either.
Was that truly how he saw me? Incompetent, unworthy,ungrateful. Impossible to compromise with, perhaps not deserving of the effort. The implications buried me like a snowstorm, shame washing in with them.
I’d been ungrateful. Selfish. Perhaps he was right, and I was the problem. I should be more understanding.
His narrowed stare shrank me, my faults piling up between us. He’d been broken by Lucidius and Kakias, his trust in anyone beaten so thoroughly it might never heal. In my anger, I pushed him away. Punished him for the choices he made about my life, our relationship.
But he’d pushed me away, too. He thought I didn’t notice, but he’d guarded his emotions as fiercely as I had, and neither one of us was willing to relent.
I wished we could revert back to our former selves, where ignorant bliss was all we knew, but that wasn’t real life. Reality was a shattered glass waiting for you to slice your hand open against it and pour your deepest desires on its surface.
No, Malakai didn’t understand my decisions, and I didn’t understand his either. But, Spirits, my fight was dying, my soul weighed down.
