Dyna squeezed her eyes shut, hugging herself. “I know what you’re thinking, I do. But I can’t help how I feel.”
Good gods. There was no hope for it then. Zev saw the truth in her heart in which he no longer had room.
How could this happen? Now of all times, on this journey? When did it have time to happen? Under his nose, it seemed, when he had been taken with his Madness. Zev looked away from her welled eyes to the darkening sky as the rain fell harder. All of him was ready to be washed away beneath it.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to find love. I do. But is it so wrong to want you to need me a little longer?”
“What do you mean? I’ll always need you.”
“No, you don’t. You’re safe with them, protected, and now…” She’d found a mate. Perhaps this was for the best. The final snip on the tie of whatever held him here. He shook his head. “I don’t have a reason to be here.”
Dyna stilled, air passing sharply through her lips. “Zev.”
She’d been watching him closely since the incident at the fjord. She had to know he was losing his grasp on his sanity. They’d skirted the issue, but he couldn’t ignore it anymore.
“It’s been three years to the day since...” Zev closed his eyes as memories tore into him like teeth.
He always remembered the same things. Flashes of blood, broken glass, his mother’s screams. Today was the anniversary of his father’s death. He didn’t need to say it. Dyna already knew. There would be a full moon tonight, and the thought of putting on those wretched chains again made his insides clench.
“I’m so tired, Dyna. Tired of mourning him. Of hating myself for what I did. I want to go where he is and beg him to forgive me.”
Dyna’s hand slipped over his and gently squeezed his fingers. “I felt that way too when my family died.”
She hadn’t told him that before.
“I was ashamed of it.” Her gaze drifted over the knoll, passing where Rawn and Cassiel lingered in the camp and rested on the trees in the south toward North Star. “My father died protecting me, yet I was struggling to find a reason to go on. I was drowning, Zev. It was so tempting to let myself sink in the black sea of my grief and guilt, but it wouldn’t be fair to their memory to throw it all away. I found my reason to keep going.”
And she had. While she had climbed out of the waves, he was nose-deep beneath the surface.
“Do you think it would appease your father if you followed him through Death’s Gate?”
Zev hadn’t stopped to think about what his father would’ve wanted for him. He would never know.
“Uncle Belzev was a good man,” she said. “He loved you. He believed in you. I know he doesn’t harbor ill will for what happened. It’s time to let it go.”
“Am I to simply forget? Forget the past, the pain, and the chains?” He asked bitterly, repeating what the Madness had said to him once before.
Dyna trembled in the icy rain, pain creasing her face. “It’s not about forgetting. That won’t heal you, Zev. You need to forgive yourself.”
Forgiveness. That was something he wouldn’t ever deserve.
“I can’t,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Why?”
Curling his fingers, Zev punctured his palms with his claws. “I killed him, Dyna.”
Since the day it happened, not once had he voiced the confession aloud. He’d feared the sound and the taste of those words. Each one pierced his chest like claws, burrowing deep. He had killed his father—with his own hands.
“So, you believe you should die as punishment?” Dyna took his arm. Her voice shook as she fought tears. “What happened that night was a mishap. It wasn’t your fault.”
“My father was the only one who accepted me, and I tore him to shreds. Nothing will ever change that.” Zev gripped his head as the whispering started.
You have nothing left here. Why do you cling on?
He didn’t know anymore.
“The Madness is always here, reminding me of what I’ve done, promising to make me forget. It won’t stop. The whispersneverstop. I’m drowning in the air, Dyna. It’s heavy and suffocating, and I can’t breathe. I want to forget. If I can’t see him, I’d rather forget it all.”
