“How . . . how did I comeback?”
His lids swept down over his eyes as though to clear them of the memory. “I bityou.”
I frowned. “You bit—oh. . .” My unbandaged eye widened. “Like in thelegend?”
He nodded, his dense stubble scraping mypalm.
“You brought me back to life,” I said in wonder. As I remembered who told me the story, his name burst through my lips. “Liam!What about Liam? Is healive?”
“He’salive.”
Beep. Beep.Beep.
“We wonthen?”
August closed his eyes. “Oh . . .Ness.”
“What? We didn’twin?”
“No. We won.But—”
“Butwhat?”
He removed his cheek from my hand and laced his fingers through mine, careful not to shift the heart monitor clamped to the tip of myindex.
“What is it,August?”
His silence intensified my pulse. The beeps pinged against my eardrums, against the EKG machine, against the fawn-colored walls, against the closed hospital door. He lowered our twined hands to myabdomen.
“It’s gone,” he whisperedraucously.
My brow furrowed. “Whatis?”
“The link,” he murmured. “It’sgone.”
And that was when I feltit.
Or rather . . . when I didn’t feel it. “Oh.”
He watched my face as the revelation settled like silt on the bottom of ariver.
“Death severed it,” I said matter-of-factly.
He pressed his forehead against my collarbone, his body heaving, first with ragged breaths and then with quietsobs.
Was he mourning its absence, or had its absence made him realize that the link was the reason he’d been attracted tome?
Probably thelatter.
He wouldn’t be crying over a brokenlink.
Not if it hadn’t altered his feelings towardme.
He was probably worried confessing his change of heart would send me into a tailspin of intractable pain. Or back into the whitevoid.
I shuddered justremembering.
I lifted my free hand to his hunched spine and stroked the hard knobs of his vertebrae. “It’s okay,” I whispered, trying to act strong even though I felt the loss inside the marrow of my very bones. “You don’t need to feel guilty, August. I won’t break, Ipromise.”
