Page 52

A isling sensed what was coming; somehow, she knew exactly the conversation Kael wanted to have. It was written on his face, the seriousness etched into the set of his brow and the hard line of his jaw.

“Later, maybe.” Her throat was tight around the words.

“We need to talk, Aisling.” He spoke low, but his tone was earnest. Still, she shook her head.

“I don't want to.” She could hear how juvenile she sounded, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. She was raw and worn thin and they’d been putting this off for so long now— why not just a little longer?

Kael ignored her dissent and held out his hand. “Come with me. Please.”

Aisling studied the creases of his palm and the calluses that dotted them from centuries of war and sacrifice.

Finally, she slid her own into it. He curled his fingers around hers, warm and strong, then pulled her to her feet.

He didn’t release her hand when she stood; his grip only tightening as he guided her out of the cairn.

The air outside was biting as ever, with a frost-laden wind that sliced through Aisling’s layers.

She barely felt it. Her focus was on Kael, walking just ahead of her with his shoulders stiff and his head lowered.

He didn’t stop until they were just at the very edge of the cairn’s glow, right on the precipice of the god realm’s impenetrable darkness.

“What will you give?” he asked, his gaze locking with hers when he turned.

The weight of his stare made her stomach twist. She hated how it pinned her in place, how it peeled back the layers of her defenses so easily.

She hated how just one look from him could so effortlessly stir such a maelstrom of feelings within her—both good and bad.

He could see straight through her, she knew, but still she deflected: “It doesn’t matter. ”

“It does; it matters to me. I need to know if it…”

If it will be something about me, he might have said, had he not cut off the thought with a sharp exhale. That was his concern now: not for what she felt; rather, for how it might affect him. Or, them—what little of them there was left.

“Not everything has to do with you, Kael.” The barb was out of her mouth before she could bite it back. He winced, and for a brief moment she regretted the sharpness of her tone. But that regret was short lived.

“You’re angry.”

His observation was nearly enough to make her laugh. Nearly.

Aisling rolled her eyes. “Of course I’m fucking angry!”

“So be angry,” he implored her. “Be whatever you need to be, just do it with me. I’m trying, Aisling. I can’t be what you need, I can’t give you what you need, unless you tell me what that is. And I want to. So, so desperately.”

She didn’t know herself—didn’t know whether she needed space, or an argument, or to pretend that everything was fine and that none of this had ever happened.

It seemed to change from one minute to the next and she could hardly keep up with her own mind, her own moods.

Aisling was exhausted just from being trapped in the ever-shifting labyrinth she’d let grow in her head.

When he reached for her again, she flinched away.

It wasn’t a choice—it was instinct, unbidden and uncontrollable.

But the way the starlight filtered through the rowan trees and broke across his face in jagged shadows drew an icy chill across the back of her neck.

For one horrible second, he looked like the version of Kael that Yalde had shown her: merciless, unfeeling, wholly devoid of anything but hate.

The flicker of hurt in his eyes was immediate before he forced it away, masking it behind a careful neutrality.

It still showed in his body, though. His hand froze in midair, then dropped to his side.

The motion was slow, deliberate, as if he were afraid any sudden movement might startle her further.

The distance was at once both a comfort and a torment.

“You thought about killing me,” she accused, wrapping her arms tight around her waist to hide the way she shivered. “I saw it.”

He nodded once. “I did. A number of times. You are the Red Woman; you infiltrated my court. How could I have not?”

Like it was the most rational, reasonable thing in the world. His blunt candor sent another rush of cold through her, but was soothing, too, in a strange way. That he didn’t attempt to hide that fact from her now brought down her guard, just a little. “Why didn’t you?”

“Something always stopped me.”

Her chest tightened. “Something?”

“You,” Kael confessed. “Something in you. Something between us.”

“You hated me,” she said. The bite was gone, though; the accusation had no real force behind it. She knew it was true, she always had. But she had hoped she’d never be forced to bring it up, that they could leave that particular wound to fester quietly, unacknowledged.

“And yet I was still yours. Even when I hated you—and I did, Aisling, I hated you—I couldn’t have kept myself from you if I tried. Though I did try.” Kael didn’t break eye contact as he said this, didn’t shy away from the roughness of the truth.

She felt the memory of his illusory, spectral grip tightening on her throat and she swallowed hard to clear it before she could speak again. “In the night garden, at Nyctara…”

He nodded. “Yes. In the dungeon, too. And The Cut, and before the moon gate, and in my study, and in my chambers. Over and over again I have watched myself kill you. I lost count of how many times I watched you fall by my hand, and each time felt just as real as the last.”

The unvarnished honesty in his admission was less soothing now and more a sharp blade between her ribs, and Aisling didn’t know whether to pull away or let it sink deeper.

“I thought it had to have been some sort of divine penance for what I did to you. And I would have endured it, every bit of it, until the realms collapsed and all of me—flesh, blood, aneiydh—was gone from this world. I would have endured it because I deserved it. But this…” Kael’s voice cracked and finally he looked away, his hands clenching into hard fists. “This, I am not strong enough to bear.”

Aisling took a shaky breath, her arms tightening around herself.

“You didn’t tell me,” she said, trembling. “You didn’t tell me what you planned to do. You didn’t give me a choice, Kael. You just put that on me; you decided for me. Do you have any idea what that’s done to me?”

The words spilling out of her now were ones she knew by heart. These were the words she’d practiced drunk by herself in her apartment, and had whispered into her knees in the shower, and had shouted to the sea over the roar of rolling thunder. These were the words she thought Kael would never hear.

“I do,” he whispered.

“No, you don’t. Your visions, your penance, none of that was real!

You don’t know what it’s like to truly live with something like that, to carry it all alone.

I gave up every good part of me that day and now I have to live knowing that I’ve killed.

Knowing that I—” Aisling had to pause for a moment, sucking in another breath of that cold air to steel herself before finishing. “That I killed you.”

“You did not kill me,” Kael insisted. He closed the distance between them, his hands hovering inches from hers, as if he wasn’t sure he had the right to touch her anymore.

“Yalde killed me. My choices killed me. I put you in an impossible position, and that regret is the weight I must carry. But don’t you dare carry the weight of killing me.

Don’t you dare take the blame for something I did. ”

Aisling’s eyes burned, but she refused to let the tears fall. Not yet. He didn’t deserve to see her break yet.

“It doesn’t matter whether you think it was your fault or Yalde’s or anyone else’s!

I can still feel it. Every time I look at you, I remember what it felt like to cut open your throat.

I remember the sound of your body falling to the ground.

The taste of your blood in my mouth. The smell of your burning flesh on that pyre.

You left me with that weight to carry, Kael. ”

His hands swept over the backs of hers when he said, “I know.”

“And I’m tired. It’s been so, so heavy.” It had been; at times, Aisling didn’t even realize how much of a toll this all had taken on her.

Until she had another nightmare, or spent another day unable to leave her apartment, or gave another thin excuse to avoid seeing her friends.

For someone raised on the battlefield and fueled by bloodshed, she thought it unlikely that Kael would fully grasp the gravity of how that one act had changed her so deeply.

Even still, it was important to her that he hear it now, whether he could appreciate it or not.

“I know,” he repeated, even quieter this time.

“You didn’t even trust me enough to tell me the truth.

You let me believe we had a future—that we had an after.

Why?” She looked up at him, every muscle and tendon in her body wound tightly, fighting hard to keep a burgeoning avalanche of emotions at bay.

She didn’t want comfort, she wanted answers.

She didn’t want an apology yet. He might be able to earn her forgiveness with time, but he had to earn the right to apologize first.

“Because I knew you would attempt to stop me otherwise. Because I am terribly selfish. And because I could not stand to lose the hope I saw in your eyes each time you looked at me.” A pause. A breath. “Do you remember when you told me I could be better?”

Of course she did. It might have been that precise, infinitesimal moment when she realized that she loved him.

But now that he was standing there, right there, right in front of her, she couldn’t summon the words.

To confess her feelings to him like this would seem like throwing darts in the dark, blindfolded.

And she wasn’t brave enough. The only certainty now was that nothing was certain—everything felt so precarious, so fragile.

Although she wanted so badly to melt into him, she was angry and afraid and far, far too stubborn.

So instead, she just said, “Yes.”

“Do you still believe it?”

It wasn’t an easy question for her to consider objectively.

Did she believe he could be better? He had given up his power, his kingdom, everything he’d worked and fought for to end the war with the Seelie Court.

He’d given his life for peace. The Kael Aisling took to bed on Nocturne would have cut her down without a second thought at the mere suggestion.

But by that same token, he’d kept it from her. He forced her hand. He was selfish.

“I want to.” It was the best answer she could give.

“Then I will—I want to —prove it to you. I know what I can give, I know what it will take to—”

Aisling cut him off, planting her hands in the center of his chest and shoving.

It only knocked her off balance, which only angered her further.

“No, enough, Kael! I don’t want to hear it.

I don’t want to hear what more you’re going to sacrifice, I don’t want to hear another grand, realm-altering plan.

It’s cold, and dark, and I’m tired. So if that’s what you brought me out here to tell me, then I’m going back inside. ”

Kael caught her as she turned, his grip iron on her wrist, and spun her back to face him.

“No,” he growled. His eyes were dark now, his expression fierce. “I will not let you push me away again. There is too much I need to say to you. If you refuse to say another word in return, fine. But you will hear me.”

When she didn’t immediately pull away Kael’s grasp relaxed, his fingers easing their hold but not yet releasing her.

Aisling’s gaze dropped to where his hand encircled her wrist, the space between them so small yet so vast. His thumb traced slow, deliberate circles over the skin just below her palm.

It wasn’t just a touch—it was an apology, a plea, and a promise all at once.

The frantic, restless energy that had been coursing through her receded just a bit.

“Then talk.” She inhaled deeply, letting the cold air fill her lungs and slow her racing heart. “I’m listening.”