“Your claws. Didn’t you notice?”
“Only later. But I don’t—”
“If you had known what was coming, you would never have reacted like that. And I realized that sometimes you have to leave a person so that you can live to go back. You have to trust in their strength until you return. And that’s what you did.”
She leaned forward and kissed his fingertips again. “I knew you would come back. I just didn’t know whether Tor was trying to help or....” Her voice shook, and it broke his resolve. He tugged her closer, against his chest, and rested his cheek against her soft hair.
Her body nestled against his, warm and soft. Completely unguarded.
Everything he wanted. And couldn’t have.
He pressed a tender kiss on the top of her head, soaking her in before he forced himself to say the words. “Nim, I did betray you.”
Her head shook under his chin. “I know you didn’t.”
“Not then, no. But the truth is….” He pushed her back just far enough that he could, finally, look her in the eye. Those beautiful, silver-flecked midnight blue eyes. “The truth is that you would never have been there in the first place if it weren’t for me. And neither would Val.”
He kissed her forehead and then pushed her slowly back. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness.”
She was silent for a long time, her eyes searching his while his heart thudded hard against his ribs and he waited for her to recognize the truth and step away.
Eventually she sighed softly and leaned her forehead against his chest, their hands still clasped together between them. “I was very angry with you.”
He couldn’t find it in him to even grunt a response.
“But then I remembered Val, that last time he came home. So different. So angry and sad. He refused to tell me what was happening, and I still don’t properly understand… but what I do know is that he refused to talk to you too. You were lied to by your king, Tris, without the benefit of whatever it was that Val already knew.”
She raised an elegant shoulder in a small shrug of helplessness before continuing, “The last thing Val told me before he left was that if I ever needed help, I should go to you. It wasn’t you that burned down my house or chained up my brother or wanted to… to….”
Suddenly he couldn’t stand the space he had created between them. Without thinking, he let go of her hands and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tightly against him. Not so firmly that she couldn’t step back, but tight enough that he could feel her, know she was safe.
“All you’ve done is try to help,” she said quietly against his chest. “You came all the way here to get Val, and you’ve exiled yourself and your entire squad to get us out.”
“No. Nim, I came with you to show you… fuck, I don’t want to say it.”
“You were going to prove that Val was guilty. I know. I always knew. But it was enough that you believed inme, you wanted to helpme. When you saw what was happening, you saved us both. We’re only alive because of you.”
He wanted to accept her words. To think that there was any way that she didn’t hate him. But he couldn’t see how that would be possible.
“Has it occurred to you that if you stayed with Val after Ravenstone, they would have imprisoned you too? And then who would have come to save us?” she asked gently.
He stilled. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance.
She looked up at him, still so serious. “I forgive you for the mistakes you made, Tristan.”
He looked back down at her, almost daring to hope. This was Nim, and she never lied.
And then she turned her face and kissed him right over his thudding heart. And then again, on his sternum, as if following his frantic pulse, and then, rising to her toes, on his neck and up to his jaw.
It was too much. He wrapped his hand around her braid and tugged until she lifted her face and he could seal his lips over hers. She opened immediately, pouring herself, her light, into him, and all he could do was hold on, revel in having her against him.
He lost himself in the feel of her, the warm, clean scent of her skin. The rush of overwhelming joy that she was, inexplicably, unbelievably, somehow still his.
He tugged at the small ribbon on her braid until it opened and her hair fell loose down her back in a shining wave of silk that he buried his hands into, angling her head so that he could take her mouth more thoroughly as she moaned, that same low, husky sound that drove him insane.
Her wings came up and around them, creating a cocoon of privacy as he ravished her, standing in front of all the world up there on the roof.
Fuck. The thought had him pulling away, breathing hard. “Not here. It’s not safe.”
