“Of doing this with someone else?”
Ozias draws in a long breath. “I am. But I know she would want me to go on.” He leans in. “I know she would like you.”
I smile at that. I let my gaze roam over his face. He’s kind and genuine. He’s helping my people. He would be a good partner. I can see it, that path that would lead me to him. There are places my heart would never be able to touch his, where it still belongs to her. I think that would be okay. “Slowly, then?”
Ozias brings my hand up to his mouth and places a soft, lingering kiss on the back of it. “As slow as you like.”
As I smile, a crack splinters somewhere deep in my chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“WOULD YOU LIKE me to distract you again tonight?” Ozias whispers in my ear as he thumbs away tension in my shoulders. I spent the entire day with Ozias practicing drawing his power into me, and exhaustion has settled deep into my veins.
“I don’t think I could stay awake and stop the transformation even if I tried,” I admit.
Ozias hums and continues to massage my shoulders as the sun lowers. “You can stay on the balcony and sleep there.”
I glance at Dyeus hovering outside the open-air window. Its visage is hazy in the impending dusk after a recent dust storm out in the Sere. Even the thought of trekking all the way down to the enclosures with any haste is outside mycapacity. “All right.”
Ozias hands slide down my back until they reach my waist, then he slowly spins me towards him until we’re chest to chest. We’ve done a lot of touching throughout the day, and I’ve needed it. To feel grounded. To feel here. I needed to avoid Zhoric last night, but today, after so much progress with my power, with this tentative possibility of a future with Ozias, I feel ready to face the Sar Dyeus again.
“Are you ready to go back to him?” Ozias asks, his tone threaded with tension, his fingers tight on my hips.
My shoulders heave with a sigh. “As I’ll ever be.”
“Do not forget your strength. Your elahi.” He leans his head close to mine and presses a kiss to my forward. “Get some rest tonight?”
I promise that I will and he leaves just before the sun sinks down below the horizon. I step out onto the terrace as the transformation sweeps over me as sweetly as a cloud drifting by on a clear day. I unfurl my wings in a long, luxurious stretch then fold myself down onto the floor.
With heavy eyes and slow blinks, I attempt to stave off my weariness, but the battle is lost and I feel content as I slip into sleep. Blissful and dark, not a thought or a dream in my mind for a long while.
By the time I’m conscious again, the stars are bright beacons in the ink black sky, marking the deepest part of the night.
“You didn’t come.”
Zhoric’s voice is a quiet timbre in the room. It’s dark in here too, but my eyes immediately lock in on him standing at the precipice of the balcony, facing the gods eyes. It’s luminous tonight, the light undulating within the oval rings.
I stand where I arrived in the middle of the room, taking him in and burning with the desire to go to him. To lay my forehead against his back and hear his heartbeat in the silence. I want desperately to feel regret for keeping him a secret from Ozias and Atlanta, but it won’t come and it makes me feel like crying. “Were you worried?” My voice barely breaks the quiet, but he hears me all the same.
“And if I was?” he asks, twisting his head and shoulder to finally look at me. The moonlight lands perfectly on hisface, highlighting every agonizingly beautiful feature, and I hate him for it.
“You shouldn’t be,” I whisper. Suddenly, my rage is the violent sea during a storm. “You shouldn’t be feeling anything for me, for anyone. Not after all you’ve done.”
Zhoric quirks a brow, a flicker of some emotion gleaming in his eye that makes my heart twist unpleasantly. “Making me your villain again?”
“Are you not?” I demand.
“I saved you. So am I?”
“You may have saved me, but you doomed someone else.”
“He wouldn’t have made it another week. Nothing would have changed.”
“Why not put him with the others you have stowed away, then?” I lash, fierce and biting.
Nearly imperceptible, he stiffens. In slow motion, he fully turns to face me. “What did you say?”
His surprise hits me like a punch to the gut.He doesn’t know.How could he not know? I don’t say any more. If he isn’t ordering the ravaged to be imprisoned, does that mean Selnor is doing it on his own? Now that I think of it, the conversation I overheard between them indicated Selnor often acts on his own. Something as big as this, though? I have a hard time believing it. My eyes narrow.
