Quinlan’s death.
I could bear no more. I ripped free of his soul, weeping. Reyker pulled me to him, leading me to the hearth, and the two of us sat before the fire. There was a blanket of soft fur beneath us, and Reyker wrapped another around us. He held me as I let go of every tear I’d refused to drop, every sob I’d caged, every scream I’d swallowed over the past months. He cried with me, his chest heaving against mine.
I wasn’t certain when the shift happened, when our breaths melted from sobs to gasps, when touches that had sought to soothe gave in to need.
“I love you,” we said with our mouths.
I am here, I am alive, and you are still mine, we said with our bodies. We kissed each other’s scars, dried each other’s tears. Long after the fire burned down and the cottage grew cold, we kept each other warm.
CHAPTER 38
LIRA
My hands were hot against Reyker’s skin, and he groaned.
“Be still,” I said, focusing the small healing stream inside me, pouring it into the bruised flesh and strained muscles in his shoulder. “Did you really think you could knock down a door as thick as your arm and reinforced with iron?”
“If you’d been the one standing there waiting for an hour, knowing I was on the other side, you’d have tried it too. I was about to claw through it with my fingernails when you finally came out.”
“As often as you get injured, I’ll have ample opportunities to practice my healing gift. How’s that?” The bruises weren’t gone, but they had faded. I was better at removing sickness than I was at mending flesh and bone.
Reyker rolled his shoulder, groaning again. “Much better.”
I ran my fingers over the scar beside Reyker’s heart as he pulled on his tunic. “With enough practice, I might get strong enough to erase this. Maybe even remove your brand and your warrior-mark.”
“I don’t want them erased.” He glanced at the puckered flesh on his chest, scratched at the slave-brand on the side of his neck. “Every scar is a story. When I die, I take my stories with me, written across my skin.”
“Not every story is worth keeping.”
“Yes. Every story.” He bent to kiss one of the scars left across my back by the thorntree knout. He’d kissed them all many times as we’d lay tangled together in the fur blankets, telling me they were part of me, they were beautiful. “These scars tell the story of our love. What we fought through and sacrificed to be together. If you erase them, you erase us.”
“I would always have this,” I said, lifting my wrist. The scar of flame that told the story of how we’d met, that connected us evermore. Reyker kissed my skoldar, and it heated beneath his lips, sending sparks up my arm, warmth flowing in all directions until I was reaching to rip off the shirt he’d just put back on.
It was the third time he’d tried to get dressed.
“Lira.” My name was a groan of desire, amusement, frustration. “Later, I will give you every minute left of my life. But for now, we must go.” In contrast to his assertion, his hands traveled down my ribs, across my stomach, along my thighs.
“Did I betray you?” I didn’t know where the words had come from, why they were spilling out at this of all moments, but now that they were out, I pushed on. “By getting close to Quinlan, thinking of him as more than a friend? Am I betraying him, tumbling into bed with you so soon after he gave up his life for me?”
Reyker’s hands froze, but he didn’t pull away. “Quinlan would want you to live. He loved you enough to value your happiness above his own. I don’t blame you for loving him in return. Nothing is gained by the dead envying the living, nor the living envying the dead.”
Could it be that simple? Choose to live, choose happiness, and still be granted forgiveness? Love Reyker, love Quinlan, without guilt? Maybe as long as I let myself keep loving Quinlan, it would feel like he wasn’t wholly gone.
Even so, the loss of him was still raw. The possibility of losing Reyker, too, so soon after I’d gotten him back, was like ripping open stitches on a half-healed wound.
“I’m not getting on that ship without you,” I said.
He closed his eyes, his breath leaking out in a sigh. “You would force me to choose between you and my people?”
“I’m asking you to stay at my side, no matter what comes. We can return to Glasnith, where I can seek answers from Veronis that might help us stand against Gwylor and Ildja. Or we can stay here and fight Draki, together.”
“That is not an option.” He let go of me, stepping into his trousers with his back turned.
I let the blanket fall and reached for my own clothes, discarded on the floor. The cold air prickled my skin. “I spent a month as his prisoner, and I’m still standing.”
“Are you so eager to go back? To be his captive again?” Reyker held up my cloak for me to step into, fastening it around my shoulders. Tension seeped into his expression, his every movement, and it struck like flint against my own ire.
“Snarl all you want. Stomp your feet and punch the walls. I can bear it. I’d rather live with your anger than live without you again, my wolf.”
It was the wrong choice of words. Wolf Lord was the name his people had given him, those who had survived Draki’s attack on Vaknavangur and helped rebuild it from the ashes. They were depending on Reyker, and I was pressing their lord to leave them once more.
“You don’t know what you’re asking, Lira.” Reyker stormed out the front door. I stepped into my boots and hurried after him.
Before I could speak, he was yelling at me. “You don’t know him like I do! The lengths he will go to, the harm he will cause you, just to hurt me. Every time I cross him, he finds some way to make me regret it. Every time I care about someone, he uses it against me. That is why he took you. What I have done, going to his home, taking a woman he viewed as his possession, he will view it as an act of war!”
Reyker paced, breathing hard, his shouts so loud the birds in the trees had taken flight. “You matter more to me than anything, and he will tear you to pieces because of it. He will take you apart and make me watch, as he did with my mother, and the gods-damned truth is that I cannot protect you any more than I could her!”
The blacks of his pupils were spreading, as they did when he fought. I grabbed his hands and squeezed, pulling him to me before he slipped over the edge. “Then we run. To Savanna or Sanddune if we must, or farther, to the unknown edges of the earth.” Like cowards, abandoning our countries, our kin, our comrades. “We don’t stop until we’re beyond his reach.”
Reyker laughed as if the idea of such a place was a joke, but his eyes cleared, his breaths slowed. His stiff muscles loosened as I rested my head on his chest. “It is your turn to ask me to run with you,” he said. “Though our last attempt didn’t quite work out as planned.”