Damn. It’s like falling into the night and discovering layers of starlight intermingled with the darkness.
“I chose to break your trust on the day I took you from the throne room with your brother and sister,” he says. “I closed my fist around your hope, and I shattered it. Every time I sensed trust growing again, I would destroy it again.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I told myself that I needed your hate. I convinced myself that your hate was safer foryou.”
He takes another step back.
“I think that’s still true,” he says.
His gaze flickers to the door and becomes slightly distant, as if he’s sensing things beyond this room. “They’ll let me pass. They don’t want me here. They’ll be happy to see me gone. I can disappear from your life like a distant shadow.” He’s nodding to himself. “This is for the best.”
He’s already near the door and now he’s moving fast. Of all the emotions I could feel right now, there’s only one that assails me and it’s far colder than it should be.
Anger.
“Stop.” I slide to the edge of the bed and off it, my feet finding the floor. “You willnotleave me.”
He pauses at the door, only two steps from it, half-turned back to me. His hair brushes his shoulders as he moves and his gaze is steadily on me.
I prowl toward him. My left fist closes tightly around the medallion and I’m conscious of the slight narrowing of his eyes when he glances at it.
I haven’t fully revealed the medallion yet, having swiped at my tears with my right hand, but he must see the edge of the band where it sits across the side of my hand beneath my thumb.
If it alarms him, he doesn’t show it.
“Erik,” I say, rolling his name around on my tongue.
He gives me a single nod.
“Erik what?” I ask. “Humans have family names.”
He turns to me fully and folds his arms across his chest. “My father cut ties with his family and left their name behind.”
This is curious information. Human families were separated against their will under Malak’s rule, which meant they were more often fighting to stay together. They weren’t willingly estranged from their kin. “Why?”
A glimmer of a smile flickers around Erik’s mouth, but it isn’t a calm smile anymore. It’s a dangerous one, and I sense the growing tension in his muscles, the way his hands dig into his biceps where his arms have remained folded.
“My father was descended from a long line of warriors who adhered to a particularly harsh way of living. They call themselves the Einherjar and believe there’s glory in death. When my brother was born, our father left his family behind.”
“But…” My thoughts are suddenly churning because I’ve never heard of the Einherjar. They certainly weren’t a group that existed within the human community back in the wasteland.
“I wasn’t born in the Blacksmith city,” Erik explains before I can become more confused. “I didn’t grow up there.”
My eyes widen at this new information. There has always been a void when it came to information about Erik’s past and his family. This could explain why.
“My father believed in destiny and omens—that much of his people’s culture stayed with him,” Erik continues. “He followed the wolves far from the north and made a home for us in the western mountains where he believed we would be safe. And we were. For a time.”
In the last few moments, Erik’s told me more about his past than I ever knew. Far more than I expected him to tell me.
Oh, but something has shifted within him.
A change so significant that I feel like I’m only seeing the surface of it.
Now, his jaw clenches and his tension increases. “Every choice my father made was intended to protect me and my brother. It was a creed he drilled into me.” The light in Erik’s eyes darkens. “Protect the people you love at any cost.”
His chest rises and falls more rapidly and his words are raw, as if it hurts to speak them. “I broke his creed. Only once. I thought I was doing the right thing. It cost me everything.”
He hasn’t moved toward me, but the gap between us feels smaller.
I wish it didn’t.
