Page 72 of His Retribution

"Bullshit! If it were real, any of it, then you wouldn't have rejected my help, rejected me!"

"Do not put words in my mouth, Cora. So help me, I did not reject you, could never reject you! I thought I had hurt you, attacked you in a bloodlust that could have killed you! It is dangerous to temp a vampire when they are—"

My body sags, my grip goes slack. I sit back on my haunches and gape at her.

I just said her name.

I just said the name of my light, of all the warmth I crave each day, and I said it out loud to her in the midst of an argument.

An argument where she said she was in love with me.

Fucking hell.

And because I have seemingly stopped fighting her, my light, my Cora, uses this to her advantage and gets out from underneath me once again. She scrambles for the edge of the bed, practically jumps from it then starts searching the floor.

"See! It's crazy!" She stomps through my cabin angrily, tears rolling down her cheeks. "All of this was crazy. I should never have gotten close to you, never should have let you in. This is what happens when you let your guard down, Cora. You become weak and vulnerable and you apparently get fucking delusional. You fall in love with a goddamn vampire and start fabricating a life that never happened. Fucking stupid, crazy nomadic idiot."

My love continues to scold herself, berate herself with so much self loathing and anger that I find myself getting mad again.

"You fabricated nothing,” I grit through teeth clenched so hard they may crack. "You finally remembered and saw the life we shared as clearly as I see it."

Cora laughs morbidly. "Don't. Don't fucking do that. I would have rather had you just outright reject me instead of feed into the bullshit my obviously warped mind, my sad naive little heart created because at least then I'd eventually be able to stop replaying something so epic over and over with the thoughts of what if.” She pulls her leggings from my dresser and starts putting them on, missing the first leg three times before slamming her foot down. "I don't need you to humor me, Havok."

Now I'm getting pissed.

So I jump off the bed and stomp over to the desk. "I have no need to humor you! What good would it do either of us for me to feed into a delusion?" I grab my key from the pen drawer then aggressively unlock and yank open the bottom one. I remove a stack of letters tied in a ribbon and drop it onto the desk, then the stack I took when I fled her house a few days ago. "You want proof? Is that it? You want proof that what you saw was real? Evidence that our love, my love for you, runs as deep as the sea and is just as bottomless? That you are, have been and always will be the brightest star in my blackest sky?"

Her eyes snap to mine as I recite a line from a letter she has had in her possession without even realizing it.

"There!" I motion toward the desk. "There is your proof. I wrote you one letter every day from the time you agreed to be mine until..." My throat is tight, so fucking tight. "Until the day I lost you. And then I continued to write you every single day, share my life without you, my undying love for you even though I could never be sure you'd ever read them." I yank open the rest of the drawers to show her, show my light the words I'd continued to write in hopes she'd one day be able to read them. "There is your proof!"

Slowly, hesitantly, she moves toward me, her gaze bounces between my scowl and the letters. Cora looks them over; first the stack I removed from her house then the others I wrote for the last two hundred and seventy five years. She looks up at me briefly then turns to the stack wrapped in a lavender ribbon, the ribbon she wore the first time I kissed her, now tied around every letter she had ever written to me.

"This… this is my handwriting..." Cora looks to all of mine, compares the original stack to the rest. "Havok..."

Thank the gods.

I can still hear the doubt in her tone but it has decreased significantly. So I reach into my pocket, finger the tarnished gold chain then pull it free.

"No..." She sobs as I hold out my watch, the one I gave her so many years ago, the one she's been searching for just as long. "Oh, my heart..."

Watching her reach out and take the broken watch with the hand that is scarred, clutch it tightly as tears stream down her face fucking guts me.

And as much as I want to, I do not go to her. No, I wait and see what happens next.

"Havok..." Her eyes close, she takes a deep breath. "You gave this to me so I could count down the minutes until you'd come for me. It had been a week and a half..." Cora smiles, smiles the way that makes my heart skip a beat. "A week and a half since our mud fight and I was nagging you about never knowing when you were going to show up."

My poor wretched heart soars. "So I gave you my watch and told you when I'd be there, told you I'd come to you each night just before eleven—"

"So we'd have an hour before you went on patrol."

Her eyes open and the second those electric blue high beams connect with mine, I see it. I see the warmth, the love, the recognition and acceptance.

And just as quickly, her eyes flash and something else entirely replaces all of that.

She sways on her feet as that vacant look veils her eyes and the second they roll back into her head, I lunge forward and catch my Cora before she goes down.

"Shit!" I rush to the bed, lay her down, check her vitals. "Cora! My angel, Cora, please. Oh my love, please don't go! Cora!"