Clearing his throat, the captain pushed me off his lap and stood. “It’ll be a relief to be back in civilization,” he said, careful and full of tact, despite the bubble of panic fluttering at the back of his throat. “But my bride-to-be is here, and I know she’s got plans—”
The Lieutenant General shrugged. Careless when he turned and his ghost went with him. “Change them. I’ve ordered a shipment of suppressor cuffs for the priestesses of the Northern front, and I expect you to be packed and ready when the convoy makes a return trip.” He paused, then. Clapping one hand on Asher’s shoulder, he smiled, and said, “Congratulations, Major. You’re going home.”
22
Home.
The word echoed around my skull. Bouncing between my ears in a distorted concert of all the many things that made my heart twist with the ache of longing.
A vicious, guttural curse hissed through his teeth as he shoved one hand through his hair, and with the other, he collared me with long, calloused fingers. Blanketing me in layer upon layer of insulating power that forced me back. Down. Where he’d left me marooned on a spit of land in a vast, forgotten ocean. Where it was dark and there was nothing at all.
Nothing except forhim, and what he was beneath a man’s skin.
The leviathan rose up before me. Seething with the sort of fury contained by a grip that was brittle and doomed to crumble—a flavor I knew well, for it reeked of vengeance.
Held in check by the scant need for privacy, so he could vent his fury without the risk of being discovered.
As if from far,faraway, I heard his gruff command to, “Walk,” when it was snarled against my cheek. Felt my feet move and knew the light was shifting around me as I was made to walk without seeing.
He commanded my body with insulting ease. Held me rapt and entranced by the storm when it began to break against me and left me unable to blink. Unable to so much as glance away from the pure, raw beauty of the man whose fingers were tight on my nape, but whose touch went so much deeper than flesh.
But I remembered.
Bits and fragments all smashed together in the jumbled mess that was the smoking wreckage of my mind, but enough to stare into the unblinking glare of an unimaginable power and know I was apart. That I would weather the punishment I’d earned, and come through it battered, but alive. Mostly whole.
Because beneath the frost, there was a tiny blip of heat untouched by the glacier that had crushed everything else.
A cinder that meant to endure.
And it had begun to smoke.
Too late, and not nearly enough, but it was all I had.
Pulling the threads of my attention in, bit by broken bit, I gathered the dregs of my mind and turned my back on the storm.
There was… peace. A certain type of silence found only in the whirling heart of a tempest.
At my feet, a tender glow.
A fosterling of dainty, fragile energy that had escaped notice.
All it took was a glance.
Just a single instant of attention, and a spark ignited in the smoke.
The sweet ache of fire spread through my muscles, begging formoreas it moved to consume all that I was. All I might have been, until I’d sold it for nothing. Rejecting what I was to spare myself the pain.
But this time, I embraced it.
The hurt.
The guilt.
The endless, wretched self-loathing, and all I’d given up to avoid admitting one undeniable truth.
That I was not enough.
I had failed.
