Two men run out and she nearly shoots them before recognizing them as Sol’s.
“Where is he?” she barks, her eyes wild. One of the men tries to grab her and she aims the gun at him. “Where is he?”
“Moira.”
Her name, in his voice, makes her sink to the ground with a sob.
She knows the moment he’s touching her, knows that it’s his hands that’ve found a home on her.
What mad poeticism is life? That the same hands that kill, can bring me back to life?
“Did you find him?” she asks, her voice hoarse as she leans against his legs, holding onto him.
“Si. One of my men saw him in the fire,” he answers, running his fingers through her hair.
He sits at her level, bringing her face to his, illuminated by the burning blaze around them. “You’re bleeding,” he notices.
“I’m alive,” she reminds him, closing her own eyes before beginning to hum.
Sol watches her stand, smiling as she begins to belt the words to the same song.
“Gin ye lay your love on a lowland lad,
he'll do all he can to slight ye;
gin ye lay your love on a highland lad,
he'll do all he can to raise ye.”
Moira’s gaze catches on the flames that lick higher and higher, reaching for the moon. And then, she’s swaying. Dancing in front of someone else’s grave.
Sol’s eyes watch every graceful move.
24
On her stomach, her naked skin bathed in another fire’s light, Moira stares at her love as his fingers rub absentminded strokes over the tiny slivers of scars that her old life had left her. Souvenirs, she could now call them.
“I made a decision tonight,” she confesses, wanting to answer a question he’d once asked her.
“And what would that be, girasol?”
“I’ve decided that I ken I want to live, Sol,” she tells him in a hushed tone, a secret smile gracing her lips.
“Is that why tonight’s lovemaking felt like my soul left my body?” he muses, his own smile living in his words.
“Aye, it is.” She giggles as he pulls her closer, her back into his chest. When his hand bands over her abdomen, she sighs into the hold.
She thinks back to a time when lying in bed only meant she was getting a reprieve from her life that went from moments of sheer boredom to moments of pain, anguish, and often solitude. In her last life, there’d been no times of pleasure; of being heard or being felt.
Moira wants to step back to a time she felt like dying, find that version of her, and wrap her arms around her. To tell her that everything will change if she just holds on. That her prince will not look like a knight in shining armor, because he is not one.
That she is not a damsel in distress, either. She is a woman who needs to be given the chance to fight for herself and take back her life.
A woman who needs to stop taking the abuse of others and stand up, ready to rip anyone apart who tries.
Sol isn’t a knight, he is a teacher; the devil’s dealer.
“Thank you for giving my life back to me,” she says, the words punctuated by tears that fill her eyes. “Unconventional as it is, it is mine and I am grateful for it.”
He presses his lips into her shoulder and cradles her as they both finally fall asleep.
How do you speak to the one you once loved most in the world, and tell her that so much has changed now?
That she is no longer your beloved person, and that the life you two planned together has come apart?
Sol’s future is now filled with thoughts of the one she wishes dead, instead.
Still, he dials the number, not knowing what he can say to plead his case. To voice reason for the one he loves.
The phone rings in his ear and he paces the floor, certain this conversation won’t come easily. But it has to happen.
If she hears this from Julio, it will break her.
“Amor,” she answers. “It has been some time since we’ve last spoken.”
The rich velvet of her voice reminds him of survival. And of home.
He misses the Spanish sun and the music and the food. Most of all, he misses the ease of the culture. Scotland feels like a foreign land, although it shouldn’t anymore.
“Lo siento, Angelina.”
“Have you been hiding from me?” she asks, humor in her tone.
Sol pinches the bridge of his nose and glances around the room, unsure how to respond. She knows him too well for him to lie; but she does not know him the way she once did. It took the sun demon to produce such a loving soul from his own black one.
“Before you answer, know that I have my ways of finding things out, even from here in Barcelona.” She’s warning him and now, he does not care. If she knows, it’s too late to take care of her feelings.
It’s becoming a dangerous game between the two of them but too much is at stake to lie and leave everything up to chance.
“Things have changed—”
“I knew I shouldn’t have sent you. Even Julio couldn’t—”
“Angelina,” he warns, his voice curt. She’s silent and he inhales before he continues. “I’ve kept my word.”
“You have not! As long as there is breath in her body, it offends me.”
He can picture her, her long black hair swinging as she throws her entire body into her anger. That’s the type of woman she is; passionate to a fault. Anger is the dearest friend they’ve shared between them. And now her anger is with him.
“Pero, Angelina. She’s just—”
“I don’t care! You bring her here to me, and I will kill her myself.”
The line goes dead and Sol sighs, tossing the phone on the table.
What could be done? What is there left to do to keep the woman he’s fallen in love with from suffering the fate he’d been sworn to hand her?
Had he kept his heart out of the equation, none of this would be at his doorstep. But it’s too late to ponder over the past.
“I did warn you,” Julio says from his place in the doorway. “I warned you, brother.”
“We are not brothers,” Sol declares as he storms past the bastard.
“Essentially,” he shouts after him, but Sol cannot be bothered to argue.
Not when he has a woman’s life to spare.
One he’s already decided he cannot live without.
25
If life were a fairytale, this would be the end of their problems.
Aside from Moira, the last of the MacQuarries are dead.
Sol talks of where they’ll go next, but Moira doesn’t understand the worry in her belly. It rolls around as she tosses and turns in her sleep.
Not even her bow and arrows can soothe the restlessness residing inside of her. Sol, unable to ease her, finds more and more ways to please her physically, until her body is too spent to lie awake at night.
She knows he waits for her now, upstairs, in their bed.
But she sits in the library, surrounded by the stories of old; ones that’d soothed old wounds. Ones that she hopes will placate new ones.
She isn’t in there very long when she feels another presence and hopes it isn’t Sol.
When she looks over her shoulder, she immediately wishes it were him.