“I know.” Ryker’s energy flared with an ugly, hot emotion. Not rage, not shame, somewhere at the brink of both. “I don’t even know which limits to think beyond. I can’t see beyond survival. So many…so many lives.”
His gaze drifted to the heap of grimy armor he’d yanked off him at the washroom entrance, where my tears had blended in with the blood. Gods knew whose.
He tilted his head to the side, staring at the leather and furs. His energy shifted with the barest tingle of hope, before it was once again suffocated by the neverending desolation raging inside of him.
Yet nothing showed on his face, still.
No spark in his eyes, no tension in his jaw.
It was as if Ryker felt so much, he’d had to encase himself in this rock exterior so none of that tumult would escape.
So that nobody would know.
But I knew.
Ifelt.
And it terrified me.
“Ryker?”
A lone breath came out stuttered. Finally, he looked at me, eyes glazed in surprise.
We’d stared into each other’s eyes for hundreds of times, but I’d never felt a jolt like this.
“I didn’t think I’d get to hear you say my name like that again,” he muttered softly.
“Don’t.” I shook my head. “Don’t talk about death so easily. Misfortune and all.”
Not right now.
Not when I could still smell the blood on Geryll’s shield.
“Not this,” he said. “That night, in the dining room, you looked at me with so much hatred, I’d lost all hope you’d ever say my name with anything other than disdain. I hadn’t realized it until now.”
“Oh.” Honestly, I’d thought we were doomed, too. Perhaps we still were, clinging to some semblance of hope to get us through the horrors. But that didn’t change one glaring fact. “I felt you. When–when it all happened…”
His eyes went wide, darkening. “You–you saw–”
“No.” Gods forgive me, but I was glad I hadn’t. “I only felt sorrow. Mourning.”
I left out the details of me writhing on the ground and breaking windows with my wail for another time. I was bidding against the gods that there would, indeed, be another moment like this, where we sat in the darkness alone.
Relief washed over him. Gods, how had Geryll died?
“I–” I licked my lips. “I can feel you now.”
He kept looking at me for the longest time; enough to make me want to squirm under that unflinching gaze.
“I can feel you, too,” he said at last. “And when you were attacked.”
My lips parted. “It was you! You were in my mind!”
Soothing me and keeping me from imploding.
“Not like that. I can’t tell what you’re thinking,” he said, the words yearning. “I had no clue why I was so hot all day. Your energy…it was transferring into me when it became too much.”
“Yours did the same thing.” If I’d only felt a fraction of his pain and it had cut me to the ground, I shuddered to imagine the true extent of what he must have gone through.
