“Why were they chasing him?”
“Dunno,” Cato answers with a grunt as I try to shift, but he only grips me tighter. “We asked but he isn’t exactly playing nice. Thought maybe you could get more out of him.”
“Don’t look him in the eyes, boss,” Sakane adds conspiratorially. “It’s one of those with the mind worms.”
“A Cavese?”
Cato nods, then drops me to my feet. I stagger, grabbing his arm for balance before rough hands yank the hood off my head. Light floods in and I wince against the sudden brightness until my vision clears.
The world’s most stunning hazel eyes stare back at me, and shock slacks his face like he’s seen a ghost. I swallow, and he does the same. Four years apart and we’re still mirrored, reacting before thought can catch up.
We might be as good as strangers now, but our bodies and souls are old friends. They reach for each other, unable to standone doing something the other can’t match, so we follow and mimic.
Every buried emotion erupts from its cage, shattering the walls I built to contain them. They rip through me and tear open the wound I’ve carried ever since that damning day. Hiding the pain becomes impossible, so I stop trying and let it loose.
It feels like dying, like losing him all over again.
He sees it.
I know he does, because he feels it too.
I see it in the raw pain playing across those eyes I know by heart. Surprise and shock morph into a blip of relief, then turn into a sadness that slices straight through every defense I’ve put in place over these past four years. Longing forms in those hazel depths, but it doesn’t last.
It could never last with what I did to him.
Heartbreak and pain take its place, only to be vanquished by anger that turns the warmth cold and harsh.
His face smooths into a mask, a hiding place somewhere safe from the danger outside.
Me.
He hides from me.
My legs buckle beneath the weight of the realization and I waver. Instinct or reflex, he reaches for me like he just can’t help it, but his arm drops limp when I regain my footing. Neither of us blinks, and I’m suffocating under his scrutiny. My breath quivers as I push it out, forcing myself to break the choking silence.
“Hey, Bash,” I whisper.
Bash
Theworldtiltsbeneathmy feet until there’s nothing solid to keep me anchored. Denial surges loud in my ears and insists this can’t be him, couldneverbe him, because the Xeni I loved is gone. Dead, or as good as dead, for all these years.
But here he stands, close enough that I can see the faint tremor in his lower lip.
My heart is already broken. It’s nothing better than a map of old breaks held together by stubborn will, but somehow, as I take him in, it finds new fault lines to split along.
Xeni stands there, unchanged in all the ways that matter and utterly transformed in the ones that hurt the most. The sight of him pierces fresh wounds into places I thought had long gone numb.
He was always lean, but now his cheeks are carved too deep, and the warmth has been drained from his pale skin. My gaze stutters as it traces the leather patch covering his left eye.
It’s jarring across a face so perfectly beautiful.
A million unspoken questions race through my mind, each with an answer I’m not sure I’m ready to hear.
He shivers, and his hair shifts under the lights. It falls almost to his waist now, a waterfall of long, wild strands that once curtained us in our own private world when he moved above me. It would tickle my face in the mornings, and I would thread my fingers through it while he slept curled against me. He was always the little spoon… always seeking the shelter of my arms.
He wanted to feel safe.
In the end, I was the one who needed safety.
