“You said she felt like another part of your soul. Like I do.” His voice had dropped to something I only heard when we were alone. “I’ve been trying not to say that for three days because I know what it means and I know what it costs. I watched my father pay it and end up as nothing.” He paused. “She doesn’t feel like an asset or a variable or a weapon. She feels like the missing thing. The thing I stopped looking for because I had you and you were enough and I told myself that was enough.”
My throat was tight.
“But it wasn’t enough, was it?” I said. I was bitter and didn’t try to hide it. “She walks in and suddenly you can find the words you’ve never found for me, and I’m supposed to?—”
“You are a part of me.” The words were low and even, and landed firmly on my shoulders. “That doesn’t change. I could never change that and wouldn’t want to. You’re not a part of my history, Thane, you’re a part of my present and my future.” His thumb pressed into the base of my skull. “I’m nothing without you. That’s always been true. I’ve never said it and I should have. I’m saying it now because you deserve to hear it out loud.”
I closed my eyes.
The cold of the dining room, the broken circle at our feet, the two flights of stairs between Aveline and us, and whatever happened next—all of it was still there. None of the practical problems had been resolved. Her father’s forces were moving, and our time was running out, and the tower was still settling from whatever it had done to repel a portal attack.
None of that had changed.
“She completes us,” he said. “Not replaces. Not supersedes. Completes. The thing we’ve been to each other runs through everything else we are. She doesn’t displace that. She’s the part of it we couldn’t reach without her.”
I opened my eyes.
He was very close, his forehead still against mine, his expression stripped of the artifice he usually maintained between himself and the world. This was Malric without the wall, which I had seen perhaps a dozen times in three years, and every time it happened, it cost him something and he gave it anyway.
“I need her. The same way I need air and the same way I need you. Not strategically. Not because of what she can do.” He paused. “And I would die before I let anything happen to her.”
I stood with that for a moment, processing. His voice rang with sincerity and a depth of emotion that I had never heard from Malric. My own panic calmed in the face of his stoic calm, steadfast and resolute. We were solid and had room for Aveline. We were finally united in our goal. Now to figure out how to make it happen in the face of an upcoming battle.
“She might say no,” I said.
I sucked in a breath and nodded. “I know.”
“To either of us. Both of us. She has the right to.”
“Yes.”
“And if she does?”
He lifted his head from mine. His hand stayed at my neck.
“Then we find another way,” he said. “And we protect her anyway. And we don’t make her feel guilty for her decision.”
I looked at him for a long moment. The broken circle caught the candlelight at its cracked edges and threw the light sideways in thin lines across the stone floor.
“You should have said all of this upstairs,” I said.
“I know.”
“You’re going to have to say it to her.”
His jaw tightened. Not in argument. Just bracing for the difficult discussion and vulnerability that he was never good at dealing with. I knew what that cost.
“I will,” he said.
I stepped back. His hand dropped from my neck.
“Then let’s go back up,” I said. “And this time you say the whole truth.”
I turned toward the stairs.
He followed.
Chapter Fifteen
