I don’t fight the catch in my voice. “You’re hiding your wounds from me again.”
“Yes.”
“Is being awake now… Is it harming you?”
He’s slower to answer and I read the worst into his silence.
“Then stop it!” I snap. “Stop being awake!”
He strokes my hair, strokes my back. “You can’t prevent my death, Caera. But there are things I need to tell you before I go.”
“What could be so important that you’d hasten your death?—”
He presses his lips to mine.
A soft kiss that steals the words from my mouth.
When he pulls back, but not far, he says, “I need you to know that despite all of the darkness in you, and despite all of the darkness inme, and despite your father’s predictions and your need for retribution and the fact that you could rend the world to pieces if you chose to…” He stops to take a breath, the calm in his voice enfolding me. “Your heart gave me something I didn’t have before and I never expected to feel.”
“What could that possibly be?” I ask, my voice bleak.
“Faith,” he says.
I continue to search his eyes, a new pain entering my chest, and once again, I feel all the little fissures in my heart, all the pieces, sliding apart. “It can’t be worth it. For a heart that keeps breaking and won’t heal…”
His lips rise in a soft smile. “It’s worth it,” he says. “Even now, the heart you gave me hammers in my chest with all its beautiful darkness. Your pain. Your fury. The protectiveness you feel for your pack. Your reason. Your logic. Your restraint. Your ability to reject what you could take in the present because you’re determined to achieve a greater purpose.” His thumb gently strokes my jaw, his gaze impossibly calm. “You proved to me that I still have a soul.”
A light enters his eyes that wasn’t there before. “You gave me a gift because if I have a soul, then I can find peace. I can join my ancestors where their magic is kept safe by the old magic keeper and?—”
“No.” I snarl, sliding forward, slipping my legs to either side of his hips, wrapping my legs around him, wrapping my arms across his broad back, holding on to him as hard as I can. “I won’t allow it.”
“Caera,” he says. “You can’t stop this. It’s already done.”
I shake my head rapidly, refusing to listen. “No.”
“Caera.” His voice rumbles again.
My forehead crinkles against his chest because he’s used that word several times now, and I’m starting to wonder what it means. “What did you call me?”
“Caera,” he says. “Beloved. My heart.”
Hot tears spill down my cheeks. Since I stole the book, so many secrets and lies have been exposed. I’ve done things I never imagined that I could. Nearly all were by accident or instinct. I had no plan. I followed no set path. But somehow, it’s all led me to this moment.
A moment when I need to decide what he is to me.
He was my enemy by birth. But now…
My mother’s voice echoes back to me.
You were loved.
I am loved.
I have no name for the keeper now. What do I call a being who gives me a beautiful night sky and then tells me he can’t share it with me?
“I won’t let you die,” I say. “I will heal my heart and you will heal with it.”
“You can’t stop this. What matters is what you do with the crown?—”
