His eyes were glassy enough that he closed them, as a pinching of ache darted through my chest.
I went to him, wrapping my arms tight around him. I was glad that he didn’t feel so…transparent. It was an odd word, but it was the only one I could think of. Back in Laras, he’d looked like he’d been a moment away from fading away. So unlike the confident and brash Luc I’d once known.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I whispered into his ear, up on my tiptoes. I didn’t trust my voice. I could barely see through the blurring of my eyes.
“Are you?” he asked, his voice tight with uncertainty.
I pulled back with a frown, keeping a grip on his arms as if he’d fly away. I wiped at my cheek. “Of course I am. How can you ask that?”
Luc closed his eyes again, and I heard his rough swallow. “In Laras…I… That day haunts me. The things I said. I know I just got here, but let me say this. I’ve thought of nothing else.”
I nodded.
He took a deep breath. “Seeing you again, it was startling. It made me feel ashamed, and I just wanted to leave. To disappear so you didn’t see me anymore.” His eyes fastened on me, despair in his gaze. “I’m sorry, Erina. I don’t know how I thought I could turn my back on you. I guess…I thought I was doing you a favor. Or else I feared I’d drag you down too.”
His explanation brought a clog of emotion into my throat, one that I struggled to loosen up. “You’re my brother, Luc.”
He inhaled a deep breath at the words.
“You’ll always be,” I said. “I have seen you at your best, and I’ve seen you at your worst. If you think that one day would’ve changed my love for you…you know me better than that.”
“I do,” he said quietly. “I do. I…I got your letter.”
Hope burst in my chest as I led him over to the bench down the steps of the terrace. It would afford us more privacy, away from Braanelle, though still within a distance that would please her.
“You went back to Kyndri’s?”
He nodded. “She told me you’d left already. And I wanted to come back to Vyaan, to speak with you, to ask you to forgive me for how I treated you. But I didn’t know if you wanted to see me. Not yet.”
“I always want to see you,” I told him. “That’s never changed.”
A hesitant smilefinallycreeped over his features. He was so much older than I remembered, but I swore I could still spy the boy I’d grown up with underneath it all. I was pleased to note that his clothes looked new, clean. The shadows across his face weren’t quite so deep, and there wasn’t the bone-aching defeat I’d spied in his eyes in Laras.
“I was going to come see you, was saving for a ticket to Vyaan,” he told me, “because I didn’t think a mere letter would be sufficient. But then…House Kaalium’s ambassador found me.”
My lips quirked, and I hung on to his hand, squeezing. “He said you gave him quite the rough time.”
“I didn’t believe him. Not as first,” Luc said simply. “It was hard to trust again, you know? Especially a noble House.” I nodded…because Idid. “But then theKyzaireof Laras visited me himself.”
Shock made me jolt. “Azur spoke with you?”
Kaldur hadn’t told me that.
Luc nodded. “That’s when I finally realized that it was real and not some big farce. I…I had no idea you were connected to them. That you—that you would do that for me.”
A quietness dropped between us as we regarded one another.
“And now you’re a mother,” he said, his voice choking up again. “A wife. AKylairaof the territory we grew up in. But ultimately you’re stillyou, Erina. I can still seeyoueven though everything has changed. The dreamer, the romantic, the forever optimist. You never lost that. And after we spoke in Laras, it gave me hope. It made me want to be the boy you once knew because I saw the disappointment on your face when you’d realized I’d lost him somewhere.”
My brows scrunched down. “Luc?—”
“You made me realize I’d given up, and that’s not who I wanted to be. That’s not who wevowedto be all those years ago. And I came searching for you at Kyndri’s to tell you that,” he said. “Then a week later, the ambassador found me. I put up a fight at first, but…then I accepted the help. And it was all because of you. I came here because I wanted to thank you, Erina. Thank you for not giving up on me. Thank you for keeping me in your heart all these long years, even when I didn’t make it easy. You saved me. You really did.”
The tears that dripped down my face were both happy and sad.
“It was you who saved me, Luc,” I told him.
The confusion flashed over his features.
