Myangerevaporatesatmy wife’s expression.
Why does she look distraught? He was forcing himself on her.
Wasn’t he?
Mayah stares down at the captain’s lifeless body, her eyes welling with tears. She looses a pained cry that rents my heart in half.
By the Skies.
My lungs won’t summon air.
Mayah falls to her knees beside the captain, tears streaming down her pale cheeks—
—and my world shatters.
I was wrong. So horribly wrong.
My wife cradles her deadlover’shead in her lap, cheeks wet with traitorous tears. She skims her fingers over his face, achingly slow. My heart splinters.
She doesn’t love me. She never loved me.
Skies damn into depthless oblivion.
He came to take her home.
And I killed him. The man my wife does—did—love.
There is no name for the cold grief seeping through my bones, a twisting, suffocating, black void of despair. It siphons every happy memory I might have had and sets it aflame.
It leaves not even a whisper of ash behind.
Grief for myself, but also forher. Because apparently, that’s how fucking deep my love for her flows. That I feelguiltyfor killing the man she loved. For the pain I caused her.
My eyes rake over her tear-stained face. The heartbreak in her eyes breaksmyheart.
Faramir’s words echo in my ears.
You think she actually loves you?
You think she actually loves you?
You think she actually loves you?
I was wrong. So fucking wrong. And now I’ve ruined her life.
I—
My wife raises her red-rimmed eyes.
I open my mouth, a fucking apology on my tongue that I barely rein in. A weak exhale escapes instead, along with the fragments of my hope.
Hope of a future with her. A life with her.
Her face hardens before my eyes—despair fading away into rage. She bares her teeth in a vicious snarl, an expression of cold violence that I’ve never witnessed from her.
Her arm whips through the air, andthe fucking streamrises up behind her.
With a sharp shove of her hand, the water flies forward and slams into my chest.
