Because right now, his pain is like a tangible force curling around my heart—tiny, unseen barbs biting through the broken organ within my chest.
I raise my left hand and unfurl it, fully revealing the medallion and the way it’s part of my flesh now. “This is why I’m in pain.”
He’s immediately riveted by it, unmoving, and other than the steady rise and fall of his chest, his focus is fully and completely on the band melded to my palm.
In those heartbeats as I wait for him to respond, I read a myriad of emotions in his features. Feelings I could never guess before that are somehow exposed to me by the minutiae of little shifts in his human face.
The press of his lips, the smoothing and creasing of his brow, the lines around his eyes, the tension in his jaw and shoulders…
A flicker of fury. A wash of regret. Then a startlingneedand an unsettling determination as he closes the gap between us far more rapidly than I was expecting.
“Give me your hand.”
His command echoes within my ears like his shout from long ago when I’d expected him to cut my hand from my body and leave me even more powerless than I already was.
Instead, I pressed my palm to his heart and gave him control of my fate.
“No,” I say softly. “I won’t.”
Now, he steps right up to my outstretched palm, the barest inch from once again enabling me to press it to his heart, and there he stops.
Even though the need and determination in his eyes only grows stronger.
“How did it happen?” he asks, his focus now on my face, as if danger doesn’t rest an inch away.
He knows what I can do with this power.
He knows I could kill him on a whim.
“What do you remember?” I ask, watching the play of his features, the small shifts that are like a puzzle for me to decipher.
“I remember the wolf that rose from the ash, and I remember you turning it to stone. You pulled me into the shade of its stone body.”
His hand rises, parallel to mine, but he reaches, as if for my face, mimicking the way he’d pressed his hand to my cheek after I’d pulled him to safety. At the time, I could hardly see through my tears because of the damage the wolf had done to him.
“I was more truthful with you than I should have been,” he whispers. “But I thought… fuck it… I was dying. What was the harm in telling you what I really felt for once?”
His expression closes off, those little shifts smoothing out all of a sudden. “But you asked me to come with you and that’s when I knew I should never have been so honest with you.”
My voice is a bare whisper as I remember that moment. “We can have more than a cage in the sky.”
That’s what I said to him.
The corner of his mouth tugs up, that surprising and unsettling hint of smile. “I wanted to sayyes. With every shred of my being, I wanted to go with you.”
His gaze flows across my face, taking in my features as though nothing about my tarnished skin, my blackened hair, or the medallion I’ve kept resolutely raised toward him worries him.
Thaden contemplated me like this, but with Thaden, it was as if he’d accepted all the changes without fear.
With Erik… the look in his eyes…
I can’t make it out.
“What do you see?” I ask him, my heart so fragile that I’m sure it will soon crack.
“I see you with my wolf’s eyes.” His hand moves in the air. “You are just as beautiful as you were the first time I saw you.”
Tears burn behind my eyes, but they’re tears of anger and disbelief. He hated me in those first moments. I was sure of it. And as for now…
