Cassiel didn’t fend off. He didn’t move at all. His eyes stayed on her as the sky rumbled with distant thunder, and rain began to fall.
“No … I do not believe myself gallant. There was nothing noble about what I did.”
“It was cowardly!”
“Yes…” he admitted. “It was.”
“Why did you do it?” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Tell me why, Cassiel, or by the Gods, I will stab you again.”
He wanted to tell her, but even now the words lodged behind his teeth. At his silence, Dyna’s hand shook.A trickle of blood leaked down from where the knife nicked him.
He could bleed out on the wet ground, and he wouldn’t care, because she was finallylookingat him. Those fierce green eyes acknowledged his existence. They were angry and sad and shining with tears. But shesawhim. The relief slammed into him like a stone wall.
Cassiel couldn’t resist faintly brushing his fingertips across her cheek. She stiffened, but didn’t move away.
“Stab me. Flay me. Torture me. I deserve it all in the end,” he muttered. “Each night I close my eyes, I see your face and relive the pain I put you through. It’s like dying over and over again, yet I accepted it because I thought that pain was worth keeping you safe, and it nearly killed us both. So I am finished standing in your way, Dynalya. I can do nothing more than follow behind you.”
She stared at him wordlessly, her ragged breaths fogging in the air. There was only them, the silence and the rain.
Dropping her knife, Dyna climbed off him and stumbled back. “Each night I asked myself why you did this, but from the beginning it was clear I was no more than a stupid, weak human to you. Best to fake her death and leave her behind, trapped where she cannot get herself killed, right? I resented that so much…” Her voice broke, and she covered her face. “I spent so much time making myself stronger to prove to you that I’m not weak … but deep down, I knew I truly was. I am reckless, and I make stupid decisions. Fair was killed and Rawn was taken because I am so stupid.”
Dyna shook with quiet sobs. She couldn’t stand anymore and toppled to her knees, weeping on the grass. To hear the fault she carried triggered something in him, and Cassiel’s vision misted. The reason he left had nothing to do with that.
All he wanted was to hold his mate. To undo all the cracks he left behind. But he couldn’t stand it if she flinched away from him anymore, so all Cassiel could do was sit beside her and drape his wing over her like a blanket, shielding her from everything else.
“I never thought you were weak,” Cassiel murmured, prompting her to look up at him. “I cannot help but protect you. It’s an instinct which has turned me into an overbearing fool from the day we met. But I haven’t for one moment forgotten the strength that you have, for not even I have that.” Tears spilled down her cheeks like dewdrops in the twilight. “You are what my people callEishet Chayil. A woman of valor. Not only for what you did in Nazar, but for the courage you showed me every day that I have known you.” He cupped her face, gently wiping away her tears with his thumbs. “Ahuvati … at mehamemet.”
Dyna closed her eyes for a moment, pulling down his arm. “Don’t speak so lovingly to me. Do you think I’ll forgive you simply for saying such things?”
It worked before.
As if hearing his thoughts, she glowered at him, but surprisingly, didn’t leave. They stayed right where they were, gazing at each other as the rain fell around them.
“You paint me as pure and good, but I’m not. Not anymore.” Dyna brought up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. “I also took lives.”
That was the last thing he ever wanted for her. He was supposed to be the one who took lives in her stead. “Do you refer to the Shades? Why did you do that?”
Because if he had perished, she would be free of him for good.
“I may hate you, Cassiel, but I don’t want you to die.” She looked out at the camp. “The one death I can’t forgive myself for is Fair’s. Yet I … I can’t bring myself to tell them...”
Cassiel sighed. He wanted to comfort her, but that wasn’t what she needed from him. “They don’t need to know. We will fix it.”
“Is that what you tell yourself when you hide things from me?”
His tongue caught.
Narrowing her eyes, Dyna straightened up, slipping off his wing. “I heard you in the woods last night. What happened in the past? What are you keeping from me?”
Trying to mask his panic, Cassiel rubbed his forehead. “Dyna…”
“If we are ever to repair a shred of our friendship again, the secrets and lies end now.”
Gods, to know there was even a possibility of that filled him with a desperate hope—and fear. He didn’t want to lie, but he couldn’t tell her the truth either. Speaking it aloud would do no one any good.
Cassiel amended by telling her part of the truth. “Do you remember when Lord Jophiel spoke of the first High King of Hilos who had turned on his people?”
She nodded. “King Kahssiel…”
