Malakai’s frame shook with a sigh. The stature was one I was very intimate with: When the world was too much and that last scrap falling onto your shoulders turned you to dust.
“I think you at least know where to begin.” Malakai grimaced, but the weight on him dulled his edge into resignation.
I nodded, pushing to my feet. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.
“Don’t be. I?—”
“I’ll always care about you, Malakai.” Maybe he needed to hear those words, because a soft smile cracked his hard exterior. And maybe—judging by the warmth blossoming in my chest—I needed to say them.
“Me too. I don’t blame you.”
“I blame fate,” I said.
Pieces of Malakai’s good still existed within him, I knew it. Maybe he’d find those pieces. He’d collect them, nurture them as they demanded, and one day someone deserving would help him put them back together.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ophelia
My knock was subtle,but I knew he’d be expecting it. Just as I knew he’d be standing on the balcony off his bedroom, glass of dark liquor in hand. It was always like this with us—the predictability. The moving in tandem. The understanding.
“I figured you’d find me when you were ready.” Tol didn’t look at me when he spoke, and I was afraid to face what I would find in his eyes if he had. The setting sun gilded his frame like my own personal Angel.
I crossed the tidy bedroom, notebooks stacked on every surface, and joined him on the balcony. My fingers were twitching. Absently, I traced circles along the stone.
“If I don’t start talking, you’ll likely wear a hole in the railing,” he joked flatly. “Sorry, I don’t have anything to offer for knots.”
Stifling the tension within me, I reached over, lifting his glass from his hands and taking a long sip. I didn’t recognize the liquor, slightly spicy with a hint of orange. It was how I imagined Tolek tasted.
Passing the drink back to him, I folded my hands to stop their fidgeting.
“I’d rather talk,” I said.
“And what is it you’d like to discuss, Alabath?” He slid the glass between his hands, not looking at me. I couldn’t remember a time before the Undertaking when Tol had avoided me. That he did so now made my chest feel like it was going to cave in.
“I’ve already spoken to Malakai.” His shoulders tensed. “Whatwasthat, Tolek?”
He took a long sip of his drink, sucking his lips between his teeth, pursing them as he swallowed. “I’m not sure what you mean.Heseemed to have an issue withme.”
Whohad the issuewas irrelevant. Why it had started—that had my heart thumping against my ribs.
I cleared my throat. “And was thatissuefor good cause?” Even to my ears, it sounded like an accusation. His chin dropped, and I quickly corrected myself. “What I mean to say is, is it true? Because whether or not it is, his grievances don’t justify his actions.”
“Is that what you truly think?”
“I think it’s none of his business,” I confessed, taking a deep breath. “But it is mine. Was he right?”
Slowly, Tol turned his eyes on me, and the look in them was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It was deeper, a bottomless hole of emotion that I was on the precipice of falling into. Tol showed more of himself to me than he did to others, shared sides of that scarred soul that he didn’t dare expose elsewhere, but this was more.
“And what does it matter if he is?”
My stomach swooped, my heart with it, because that was as good as a confession.
“How long?” I whispered.
“Since the day I first saw you fight.” He ducked his head. Bashful—an emotion I never thought I’d see on him. “Not the play things we did as children, but the first summer wereallytrained, when we were thirteen. The fire in you, the inability to back down, and the utter glow about you when you did what you were born to do. You were mesmerizing. My young brain became obsessed. Spirits, I think I noticed it earlier than that, but I didn’t understand it then.”
The fact that he’d been captured by those things about me and held on to them for all these years caught my breath in my throat. But?—
