Elloven could barely get the words out. “You succeeded.”
Sadness clung to him like a second skin. “And I’ve never, ever regretted anything more.”
It was too much, too raw, too real. “Everyone regrets hurting people after they die,” she retorted. “You didn’t have to come all the way to the Infinitum for that.” Knowing her life had been a useless waste was strangely a comfort in the Infinitum, a clarity leading to the shattering but necessary conclusion she’d been erased from a world she’d never belonged to anyway. Jesstin’s cruelty had cut the final thread of hope, freed her. She’d challenged him? Had he not upended her world too? And now he was doing it again, infiltrating her safe little escape, where maybe she was lonely and scared, but it was better than being ripped apart by the tease of something real and lasting. It was a wound only starting to heal, and he wanted to cut out the stitches? Watch her bleed to clear his conscience?
For weeks, she’d harbored the secret wish he would find her, but not like this.
“The second the words were out, they weren’t mine anymore, and I couldn’t take them back. But I thought if I could hurt you enough, you’d leave, and if you left, you’d be safe.” Jesstin cosseted his hands around hers. “I won’t further insult you by asking you to forgive me, because you shouldn’t. But you need to know that the things I said about you were so unfair, so myopic and far from the mark, and there’s nothing worse I’ve ever done than obliterating the hopefulness I saw in your eyes when you thought you’d finally met someone who understood.” He sharply exhaled. “No, the worst thing was how good it felt.”
It was the most frank thing he’d ever said, probably to anyone, and she wished she had half the eloquence he offered her. She hadn’t even decided whether she was feeling relief or anger.
Or love.
The possibility it could be that was the most devastating of all.
His teeth scraped his bottom lip. “And then when I lost you, in the sept...”
When I lost you. Elloven withdrew her hand and made herself small. The pads of his fingers brushed along the side of her jaw, sweeping near her ear, where he tucked some of her hair, and she cringed from that too.
But she missed his warmth the moment he withdrew his hand. “You don’t deserve any of what’s happened to you, Elloven. Only a fucking monster would contribute to your belief otherwise.”
It was always, always later that the right words came, never when she needed them. She could forgive Taven, despite that he’d never actually apologized for anything, but not this man, speaking from a place of real vulnerability? If she couldn’t recognize the difference, even if he regretted his words, there was truth to them.
Elloven listened to her heart instead of her busy, meddling mind when she leaned in and rested her forehead against his chin. There was no stopping the shivering, which intensified when his arms formed around her, tentative and restrained but strong and solid.
Her eyes didn’t need to search for his when she tilted her head upward. In his was the same pain. Why he was there... what he was doing... She had so many questions, but there, then, surrounded by the memories of their candid encounters in the Night Soul, seated upon the chair the king had willed into existence for his queen, she wasn’t sure any of that mattered.
Her upper lip skimmed Jesstin’s lower. She didn’t recognize the woman who’d done it, but her arrival was irreversible. She knew that much.
Jesstin’s soft breath vibrated. She took in the warm ambrosia as she moved her lips higher, their exhalations becoming one, locked in the fork of the two very different paths she could take, each a measure of the extent of her courage.
Then he broke away. His head shook as he angled it down.
The blood plummeted from her face. “I am so sorry,” she blurted in a mortified rush.
“Elloven.”
“I wanted to show you I forgive?—”
“No.” He swung his head back up. His gaze was insistent, and when she failed to meet it, he reached for her face and held it in one hand. “We need to talk. We need to sit and really talk, when it’s safe, when we’re together. Before anything else.”
“Together?” Elloven studied his face, but she couldn’t find anything explaining the sudden shift. “But you can’t stay here. You have to get back.”
“I’ll stay as long as it takes.”
“As long as what takes? And what do we need to talk about that you can’t say here? Do you know more about what happened in the sept? I was targeted, wasn’t I? Someone was working with the silver tongues.”
“They already know it was Ryquin. He needed me to come here, and he knew I didn’t trust him.”
“For what purpose?”
“He believes there’s a door only I can find, and if I open it, he can enter as a living man. He wants power he can’t get in Rivenholde. But he wasn’t the only one who needed me. Some of the dead approached me in the labyrinth and asked for my help to break the curse keeping them here. They both believe I’ve come for them.”
“I know you’d never ally yourself with Ryquin.” Elloven had been wondering when he’d explain why he was there. “And it’s kind of you to want to help the dead, but it seems like a bigger task than one man can take on.”
“I’ll help them if I can, but I didn’t come for them.” Jesstin combed his fingers up her cheeks and into her hair at her temples, a half-formed, sad smile softening his eyes. “I came for you, Elloven. Just you. And I won’t leave until I find a way to take you with me.”
No one had ever—she didn’t even need to finish the thought, for of course no one in her life had come close to showing up for her the way Jesstin, someone she barely knew, was now. But the words, barely knew, felt so far afield from reality, she understood that time had never meant anything for the two of them.
