“What are you saying?”
He shoved his hands through his hair with a groan. “You two were—are—like planets. Always rotating in each other’s orbits, like it’s a natural instinct you can’t avoid. It got worse, too, since I was gone. You always turn to him, and you expect me to believe you didn’t notice? I’m not stupid.”
“Well, you could have fooled me right now.”
Tolek and I had always existed like two parts of a whole. Explanations unnecessary, reckless abandon indulged without question, tears shed without embarrassment.
But nothing had ever happened. We had never acted on the charged chemistry thrumming between us, causing an inherent form of communication. I didn’t even know if Tolek felt it, too, or if I had made it up.
“Tol and I are close. We understand each other on a deeper level, as you and I have.”Had.
His entire frame drooped, and I realized too late the implication of that comparison. “What happened when I was gone, Phel?”
“What happened?” Every minute of those two years rushed through me at once, every slice of longing, every shard of heartbreak. And with it my control snapped. “Ibroke—that’s what happened. You were the brightest star in my life for eighteen years, the point around which my world revolved, but that’s unhealthy for anyone. Because when you lose your polestar, you have nothing left.”
“So, it’s my fault? Because I signed the treaty and gave myself over, it gives you the right to be with my best friend?”
The fire cast shadows on him, and I briefly wondered if that was how it felt to be in his head. All dark past and dimmed hope.
I tempered my anger a little.
“It’s no one’s fault.” I ran my hands through my hair, calming myself further. Malakai was angry and healing. That’s why he lashed out. “I’m not with him, but even if I was—like you said, you left. Had you expected me to live out the rest of my days alone?”
Instinctually, I wrapped my fingers around the Bind, almost willing it to kick back to life to assure me that wehadhad something special when we received it. That passion hadn’t just been a figment.
Malakai averted his gaze, toying with the cuff of his sleeve, and that avoidance broke my resolve.
“This is simply how things are, Malakai. For so long, I was blinded by the light you brought into my life, but when you left me—with this tattoo on my arm that couldn’t find its home—I was plunged into darkness. It tookevery good part of mewith it. You took those parts.”
Did he still not comprehend? After how many times I had tried to explain it to him? It seemed like he was purposely ignoring me. And maybe he was; that was his right, but he didn’t get to throw it back at me without even attempting to understand.
Angels, matters of the heart were messy.
“What we had was all blinding starlight, then? Nothing real?” He turned away from me, falling onto the couch with a contemptuous huff. The dismissal landed like a blow to my cheek. Were there truly no good pieces left of the man I’d loved?
“No.” Not wanting to get too close, I perched on the arm of thecouch. “Donotput words in my mouth. We were beautiful. We were perfect and innocent and maybe too much so for this world, but every single moment between us was real.”
Despite the silence in my tattoo, I knew it was true. I found that strength in myself to not darken our past with sordid beliefs.
“You were the only thing I ever considered for my life, but maybe that was the problem. We were complacent, taking the obvious future as destiny. But look at everything that’s happened. Everything we’ve been through. The easy path is not always what we’re given.”
I had never seen myself as Revered and yet it was now the title thrumming through my blood. The strings of fate had a way of redirecting us, and I was learning that relinquishing control was okay. Becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable was freeing.
I took a deep breath, exhaling the venom charging through my blood. “When you were gone, I grew. We both did. And this new version of me isn’t suited for that new version of you.”
“And are you suited for him?” He hunched, elbows against his knees.
“I don’t know.” I wasn’t just sparing his feelings. I had always known something deeper lay between me and Tol, but I had never stopped to pick it apart, decide what I wanted from it. Or ask Tolek what he wanted.
When I admitted I was as lost as he was, a piece of Malakai visibly crumpled, head into his hands, heart bleeding out on his sleeve. Like thinking I was holding it together was somehow holding his world together, too.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered, rubbing the heel of his palm against his chest as if it seized and flopping back against the cushions. He didn’t only mean this situation—he meant the rubble his life had become. If I had to bet, I’d say this entire fight had only been fueled by that mess.
“Me neither.”
Two and a half years ago, a part of my heart had been ripped from my chest, repeatedly trampled with each injustice I experienced, up until the day we both stopped pretending we would work.
Then, I’d shifted my focus from catering to the delicate scraps of his heart to piecing my own back together. Despite how broken helooked before me, I couldn’t let him take that progress. The part of me he had owned may have been warped, but it was finding its way back into place. I was healing. I would always hold some allegiance to Malakai, but my heart no longer belonged to him—it belonged to me.
