And yet…I heard the truth in his voice.
“Believe me when I say that my fidelity to you is the last thing you need to worry about,reiMorakkari,” he said. “Thatis one vow to you I have not and will not ever break.”
A soft exhale, perhaps one of disbelief, of shock, left me.
Shock because…I actuallybelievedhim.
“Why?” I asked. “Why is that so important to you when the other vows aren’t?”
I caught his subtle flinch. His hand tightened on my own.
“It’s not that they aren’t important to me, Mina,” came his ragged voice. “It’s that I’ve been so foolishly blinded by my own pride, by my own weakness when it comes to you, that I have disregarded them.” He tilted my chin up so I met his eyes. “For all of this, I am sorry. So very sorry,Mina.”
He wasapologizing?
The only time I’d ever received an apology in my life was from my father. Right before he died. He’d apologized to me because he knew that he would no longer be able to protect me, to be with me. He’d been too sick and he’d known that his time was limited.
The memory—and Wrune’s apology—flooded my eyes with unexpected tears.
His expression shifted. His brows furrowed, his mouth pulled down. “Nik,don’t do that,rei Morakkari,” he said softly. “Don’t do that.”
I wiped at my cheeks, embarrassed that I was crying in front of him. And yet, it felt good. Like a release. A release of all the tension that had been building between us.
“I will not break these vows to you again,” he murmured. In that same solemn, honest voice. “That I promise you, Mina.”
“You can’t promise that,” I whispered, trying to blink back the tears that continued to fill my eyes.
“I can,” he said easily, a hint of the arrogant, confident male I’d come to know shining through with those simple words. “I know that I do not deserve your forgiveness but I ask that you let me try to be worthy of it. I ask that you let me try to prove that I can be a good husband to you.”
I was beginning to feel a little overwhelmed. Just a few moments ago, Rakoni had been brushing through my hair…and now a horde king was on his knees before me, begging for my forgiveness.
Swallowing, I asked, “What brought this on? Why are you doing thisnow?”
“Because I no longer have the strength to stay away from you,” he rasped. My eyes widened at the words. “Since I first saw you, I’ve always been torn in two completely opposite directions. And I’ve come to realize that I’ve been following the wrong one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You are mykassikari,” he told me.
“Kassikari?” I whispered. “What does that mean?”
“My mate. A mate of the old way,” he explained. “Of the old tradition. A mating pair chosen by Kakkari herself.”
I stilled.
He was telling me that he believed the goddess had chosen me for him? And that she had chosen him for me?
“I have known since you first appeared to me in the fog,” he confessed.
“I don’t understand,” I told him. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“It means that you were always going to be myMorakkari. You did not steal that place from anyone because you were meant for it since your very birth,” he growled softly. “It means that a part of my soul attached itself to you even then, marking you as mine. You felt it, didn’t you? I called it a madness, a small madness, but I knew what it really was. It wasknowing.”
A sharp exhale left me. I felt a prickling at the back of my neck. His words were impossible and yet, they feltfamiliar. So incredibly and achingly familiar.
“And I know that you felt it too,” he added gruffly. “So you see, you were always meant to be mine. I recognized that from the very beginning but I fought against it with everything I had in me. Even after ourtassimara, I fought against that path, the path that Kakkari had revealed to both of us. I couldn’t let go of howeasilyI fell to you. I blamed you for something that wasfated, that neither one of us could have controlled. Or foreseen.”
“That was why you always called mesarkia,” I whispered, realization going through me.
