Sebastian reached his hand up, using a swollen finger to brush a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Damn right, he will.”
A knock hit the door, and we both turned our heads to see Venay lingering in the entryway.
“You're awake.” She sounded surprised as she stepped into the room, approaching Sebastian and looking over his visible injuries. “I have to re-break your ankle. The bone has begun to heal, and if I don’t properly set it, you’ll never walk normally.”
Sebastian threw his head back to the pillow beneath him. “Fucking fantastic,” he muttered.
Venay turned to me. “You should let him rest,” she urged.
“Give us a few minutes,” Sebastian demanded, and when Venay obliged to his request, his beautiful irises—the only part of him not mutilated—settled upon me.
“I can come back later. You heard her, you need to rest,” I advised, wondering if he needed me to say it before he would actually allow it.
“I will rest, but I want to talk to you first.” He scooted backwards, putting his back flush with the headboard, the normally simple process displaying just how much pain he was still in.
“There’s nothing to talk about that can’t wait,” I assured him, setting his hand free at last.
He ignored me, sucking in a few sharp—and no doubt painful—breaths before saying in a low tone, “You shouldn't have come.”
I furrowed my brows. “What?”
“I told Kohen not to let you come. Now Beaumont knows for sure that you are alive.”
“He knew anyway, and of course I was going to come. And good thing we came when we did, Seb. You were already half-dead when Kade got you out of there.”
He groaned as he stretched his neck out, his spine cracking audibly with the motion. “I would have happily died to keep him from knowing that you’re alive.”
My lips met my chin in a frown. “That’s not something I could have lived with. And what's done is done. There's no point in scolding me now, just be grateful that you're here.”
“I’m not scolding you. I just hate that you felt like you needed to risk your life for me,” he answered, sucking in a deep breath as a wave of pain encased him.
“I would risk my life for any of you,” I answered. “Any day. Any time. No matter what.”
He reached out for me, intertwining a finger in a strand of my brown waves. “I have so much to tell you all,” he forced out.
“Once you're better, we can deal with that. I'm sure we have even more to tell you.” I debated telling him that we found his mother’s journal, but decided to hold off. He needed all of his focus to be spent on getting better. And besides, Venay planned to undo her enchantment on it tonight, not that she needed to since Sebastian was back, but he was in no shape to handle that news at the moment and read through the journal’s contents. So the group wanted to get reading as soon as possible while he recovered.
He nodded once. “Did Leighton make it out? Is she here?”
“The bookkeeper? Yeah, she's here. She's in interrogation with Archer, as we speak. Once Venay proves her honorability, she will be cleared and allowed to stay.”
“Good.” He put his head back again, as if it was too heavy to hold.
The seal of the grief that I had enveloped while he was gone tore open. “Seb, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? For what.”
I fidgeted, rolling the hem of my shirt. “The last thing I said to you before you left…was horrible to say the least. All I couldthink about while you were gone was how if you died, that would be the last thing I ever told you.” I turned my neck away to get his broken, but still beautiful, face out of my view.
“Maeve,” he said my name as a breathy whisper that threatened to make me forget everything that had happened between us. “Are we ever going toreallytalk about it? About us?” he finally asked the question I knew had been eating away at him the whole time he was in that cell.
I sighed. “This isn’t the right time to get into that.”
“You keep saying that. And will the time ever be right? How long are we going to dance around having an actual conversation?”
“I don’t know what else there is to talk about, Seb.” His hand settled on mine as I turned back to him, though I wished I hadn’t, because the hurt in his eyes killed me.
“We can talk about how the entire time I was in Draemor, all I could think about was you and what I would do to earn your trust back when I made it out.”
