My heart bottomed out.
His name bulldozed through the partition I’d managed to keep in place. My feelings toward Kite plaited with my feelings for Jethro.
I slammed deeper into love.
He’s mine.
His eyes squeezed closed, pressing his forehead on mine. “Nila...you—you don’t know what you’re doing to me.” He trembled in my arms, his hands bracing himself on the door. “Take it back. I—I can’t take so much from you.”
“I can’t take back something that already belongs to you.”
Tears.
I wanted to cry.
I wanted free my terror at falling in love. I wanted to beg him to be strong enough to choose me after stealing everything that I was.
I couldn’t compete with what he did to me in the spring. He’d reached inside me and ripped my heart from my chest. I didn’t fight it. In fact, I’d carved it out for him.
My hands were bloody from presenting it to him with open arms.
I.
Love.
Him.
Before, I was in a cage.
I wasn’t any more.
I could see. I was free. Ibelieved.
“Tomorrow.” He exhaled shakily. He clasped my jaw, running his thumbs over my cheeks. “You’re mine. You deserve to know the man you’ve chosen—the man you’ve saved.”
A shooting star sliced through my soul. “I saved you?”
A soft smile tugged his lips. “You have no idea, do you?” He kissed my forehead, filling it with overwhelming feeling. “No idea what you’ve done to me.”
His delectable smell wisped around us. I wanted to fall into him and never let go.
He whispered, “Tomorrow, everything that I am becomes yours.”
I shivered at the truth in his eyes, the echoing affection. “Tomorrow.”
With a barely-there kiss, he transmitted every emotion he couldn’t say and backed into the shadows of the corridor. “Tomorrow, I’m taking you away from here. I’ll give you what you’ve selflessly given me. I’ll tell you...everything.”
* * * **
Overnight, I’d turned from a supple young woman to arthritic hag.
I didn’t sleep. I doubted I’d ever be able to sleep again with the excitement of what today would bring.
Jethro will tell me.
Finally, I would know.
Last night, I’d thought about reading the Weaver Journal to see how my mother and grandmother felt paying the Second Debt. Had they made note of it? Or were they like me and saw what the Journal was—a way to monitor our hearts and minds? I wanted to see if they’d done what I did: fall for their tormentors.
