Inside, he shifted to face me. Because although our bond may be tattered, it still knew.
His voice came through the tent wall. “I can’t apologize.” He took a shuddering breath. “I can’t apologize because I’d do it again.”
Something inside me cracked. It wasn’t the loud, savage break from earlier. It was the kind that collapsed inward, silent and final.
I curled my hands into the dirt, the rhythm from the earth that once soothed only seemed to scrape against my nerves.
“I get to choose,” I whispered. “I get to choose how I live my life.”
There was a beat of silence as he moved closer to the tent wall. So close I could feel the heat from his body and wished I could nestle against his chest.
“But you weren’t choosing to live, Finley. You were choosing death.”
Tears burned the corners of my eyes. “All this time, I’ve been worried you’d regret binding our magic to our bond.” My throat tightened. “But it’s me who regrets it.”
The silence that followed was heavy. Suffocating.
I rolled onto my side to face the tent wall that separated us. And on the other side, he didn’t move away but closer. Which somehow made it worse.
Chapter
Thirty-Six
BRENTON
I couldn’t sleep.
I lay on my side, facing the tent wall where Finley slept on the other side. Listening to her steady inhale and exhale. To the soft, distant thump of her heartbeat.
She still sounded like home.
I’d give anything to curl around her and draw her close.
Instead, I lay there, counting her breaths, a reminder she was here. Alive. And that this stupid, fucking tent wall was all it took to feel how far apart we’d drifted.
I dragged a hand across my face, trying to smother the tight knot that lived behind my ribs. The boy’s lifeless body. The way she’d looked at me. All the ways we’d failed each other in a single day.
A low current stirred at the edge of my mind.Hoshiko.
I sat up, alert and ready for whatever came.“What’s wrong?”
“Etienne,”he said.“His dragon, Aelus, is worried. The night terrors have gotten bad, and his panic attacks are even worse. He’s scared Etienne might get hurt during one.”
I was already moving, pushing off the bed mat and stepping through the tent flap into the night. I hurried to Finley, wholay curled on the ground, knees drawn to her chest. Moonlight shone against her features, and I took in the way her hair, much shorter now, fanned across her face and along the curve of her jaw. Her fingers tightened against her other wrist. Her bare wrist.
My breath stammered out.
Her bracelet, the one she’d held on to after all these years, was gone.She did it. She finally let me go.
Heart aching, I knelt in front of her, slow so as not to startle her.
“Finley,” I whispered, her name cracking as it came out.
Her lashes fluttered, and for a beat she just blinked at me. Disoriented but still hollowed out. Then she flinched away.
My hands tightened into fists, but I kept my tone soft. “Etienne isn’t doing well.”
That was all it took. She was standing in less than half a beat. The torment etched across her face was momentarily forced aside by concern. She was breathtakingly fierce in the way she always threw herself between the world and someone else’s pain.
