Page 28 of Ties of Starlight (Tethered Hearts #2)

I donea didn’t say another word. She didn’t have any left in her, not for the rest of the night or the following morning. Nyrunn didn’t say much either. He just held her like he always did that night as they slept and she stared at the faint outline of his face in the darkness.

Nyrunn had been right. She’d known somewhere deep down, but she just wouldn’t let herself face the truth about Bror.

But if she really wanted to bury him and see Nyrunn for who he really was, she had to accept the truth about Bror’s words and actions so she could see Nyrunn’s were nothing like his.

If she was going to live this life while she had it, she needed to be honest about all her past ones as well. She wanted someone to know them, messy and horrible and painful though they all were—Nyrunn knew she was a murderer and still he had not shied away.

The next day of travel went like the others. Idonea and Nyrunn had no privacy during the day to speak openly, so they were to be entertained by Asa and Frode’s bickering, growing less heated and more playful by the day.

When they arrived at their next camp, Idonea slipped away this time, leaving Nyrunn to collect their food again as she ducked into their tent. She threw a little starlight up before sitting on the bed with her bag. She dumped all the journals onto it, leaving Bror’s account in her bag.

She flipped them open but was unable to really organize them chronologically since her memories of each life were scattered throughout and she didn’t have journals from any life before her third. The tent rustled and Nyrunn came in, sparing her from having to make any decisions on the subject.

He approached the bed with plates in hand and asked, “What are you doing?”

Idonea just set the journal in her hands down, open to a page that mentioned a memory of her fourth life remembering the death of her third. She took a deep breath and gestured to them. “These are all my journals. All my memories.”

Nyrunn approached slowly. “Are you… looking for something?”

Idonea laughed. “What do you think I’d be looking for?”

“A way to break the curse.”

Idonea’s blood ran cold. Was he still thinking about that?

He’d better not be. She’d already told him what would break it, and that was the only way she would ever break it. When she got it right.

“No.” Idonea looked back at the open pages. She picked up the journal from her fourth life again and closed it, tucking it to her lap. “I… I didn’t get these all out for me. I… I wanted you to… If you want to, of course…”

Nyrunn took a seat beside her, setting the plates to the side. His hand rested on her knee and she tightened her grip on her fourth life’s journal. “You want me to read them?”

She nodded. “I thought… maybe they’ll help. It’s… I know I’m not easy to understand and it’s a strange predicament we’re in, and this is probably the closest thing I can give you to help you understand.”

Idonea wanted to be known.

She didn’t want to be a ghost passing through this life until her next. She wanted to wake up in her next life and know she had given this life and this marriage all she could. Nyrunn didn’t deserve anything less.

Maybe… Maybe she wouldn’t feel so alone even when he was gone and she was back because at least in this life he’d known her, dark and messy and fragmented all at once.

Nyrunn’s hand covered hers and her breath caught in her throat. “I would be immensely honored.”

That feeling on the other side of the bond swelled again. What was it?

She started to shift, but Nyrunn’s palm brushing her cheek had her freezing. “I would be even more honored if you would read one of them to me, love.”

She choked on the word. “Love?”

His thumb swiped over her cheek and his grin was pained and soft all at once. “I’m hardly going to keep calling you ‘little lily’ now that I know how you’ve been hearing it this whole time.”

“You didn’t know,” she whispered, but she didn’t pull away.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t think it would make a difference. I know better now. ”

“Good. Now… read to me, love. I want to hear it. I want to hear everything.”

Idonea reached for the journal from her third life. That one would be safe, as safe as any journal of hers was.

As she opened it, Nyrunn settled in, lounging on the bed behind her and wrapping one arm around her waist to lean her against him. She looked over her shoulder. “You do know all of these journals are going to involve Olaug intensively.”

“I will hold my tongue and be a good listener, I promise. I want to understand you, and your history with him is part of that. I won’t pretend otherwise.”

Idonea pushed past the tightness in her throat and blinked rapidly to force the tears away. Why would that make her want to cry?

Maybe this would be good for her too. She didn’t seem to understand herself lately either.

Idonea started reading, leaning back into Nyrunn so he could read over her shoulder. His hand rested on her hip as her soft voice filled the air. That feeling from Nyrunn on the other side of the bond kept humming, calm and contented, but it wasn’t exactly either of those things.

It was starting to drive her a little crazy, not being able to quantify it.

She spent that night reading to him from her third life, mostly the memories about when she realized the memories of the past two Cometa Brides were haunting her were because they were hers. Even though she warned Nyrunn he’d have to deal with Olaug being featured, she did her best to avoid passages and memories that were centered around him, at least for tonight.

Nyrunn didn’t interrupt. He just held her, listening and softly tracing his fingers over the fabric of her skirt. The warmth of his hand seeped into her skin, nearly distracting her from turning the page when she needed to.

She read to him about the fragmented memories, about her search for answers, feeling she was losing her mind. She read to him about how when she tried to seek help, the elven healers wrote it off as her human blood and emotions, that there wasn’t anything they could do about her strange dreams. She read to him about how she knew the nightmares and memories were coming for a reason. She had this feeling deep in her soul that something was missing. There was something she needed to find for it all to make sense, and using the clues the memories of another life gave her to find it became her sole obsession.

When her voice turned hoarse, it was his hand over hers that closed the journal and she let out a soft gasp when his lips pressed into her shoulder. “It’s late, and you’ve relived enough for tonight, love.”

As they reached the last leg of the trip, Idonea reading from her journals or Nyrunn reading them himself became their routine. After they ate with Asa and Frode, they would slip away to their tent to get ready for bed, and pull out Idonea’s journals.

When she was too exhausted to keep reading, he would pull her head into his lap and run his fingers through her hair as he picked up the journal and continued where she left off. Idonea didn’t know why he was doing it.

Why he was doing anything he had been.

Well, there was one possibility she considered, but it felt outlandish even to think it.

But had Nyrunn developed genuine affection for her? Did he see her as more than just the wife he was stuck with because of Olaug abandoning her?

Even if it was true, it was probably only because she’d saved his life .

But then why would he insist he’d thought she was beautiful long before then?

She supposed it could be true, and he hadn’t just been saying it to make her feel better. If that was the case, which she couldn’t quite wrap her head around either, she supposed it made sense he would develop some affection for her if he already thought her somewhat physically appealing and was insistent she stay and be his wife.

She had no other explanation for why he would call her “love.”

He certainly seemed to want more than just “peaceable.”

But he’d yet to bring up such a change in their forced and unplanned relationship.

Still, she was grateful after that first night she’d removed a few pages from her fourth life’s journal and hidden them with her clothes. If she was right, and Nyrunn had read them, he would be furious. But even him discovering that wasn’t the most terrifying thing about all of this.

Idonea had been poisoned, kidnapped, drowned, and plenty more. She knew the moment of terror right before it, knowing what was happening but being unable to stop it, very well. It was like a second skin.

And yet those moments were nothing compared to the terror she felt now. Dying she had done before.

This?

This was new.

The way her heart leapt to see Nyrunn approach, the way she felt safer than she ever had before in his arms, the way she could not pull her eyes off his face in the early dawn before he'd woken up.

None of this had happened before.

This affection for another man who was not Olaug was foreign .

And frightening.

And the way Nyrunn treated her was also strange and startling. And apparently, the way he'd been treating her for years. Everything she'd mistaken for cruelty had always been kindness. What had she ever done to earn his kindness?

What had she done now to earn his smiles, to deserve the way he held her when she woke up after having been drowned, stabbed, her neck broken, and worse?

He most certainly was not like Bror. He definitely wasn't like Olaug.

What terrified her most was how little she thought of him recently.

And it made her feel incredibly guilty. Even if she was tied to Nyrunn for this life, Olaug was the one she was tied to for eternity. He was her soulmate. How could her heart be so fickle to start to take the devotion that had always been for Olaug and direct it toward Nyrunn?

And yet there she was, caring more about Nyrunn's smile than Olaug's location.

She was wondering more about if the next night would be the one where Nyrunn would finally lean a little closer and close the distance between their lips than if she would ever even see Olaug again before she died.

What was wrong with her?

On their fourth night of going through her journals, she was dozing lightly in his lap, idly watching as he picked up her current journal and flipped it open. His other hand came to rest on her shoulder as he began reading. Even after several nights of this, it was both nerve-wracking and incredibly calming. She couldn’t decipher what he was thinking as he read the details of her memories and past lives, but she could sense what he was feeling. There was often a mix of anger and a white-hot sickening envy when he came across passages that featured Olaug, specifically Idonea’s love for him, but his expression never changed. He never showed it.

When she recounted her memories of her deaths specifically, especially the ones with more gruesome and torturous lead-ups, she could feel his repulsion and compassion. Several nights he reached them and stopped shortly after.

But mostly there was the soft, warm, safe feeling she still hadn’t quite put a name to.

He never said anything though.

Until now.

His hand on her shoulder, the fingers idly tracing circles on her skin, froze. She lifted her head slightly to look up at him.

Before she could ask, he lowered the journal to look her in the eyes and whispered, “You wrote about me?”

Oh. He’d come across the day they first met.

“Did you read the part where I called you insufferable?”

“You wrote about me the first day we met. Which meant you wanted to remember me.”

“I mention you more than once. Never flattering. I always record what’s different or strange. I didn’t expect you.”

Nyrunn’s lips turned up. “No. No, you didn’t.”

“Keep reading if you want, but you won’t like what you find.”

“I think I like the way my name looks in your hand just as much as I like it coming from your lips.”

She pushed at his chest, but not hard enough to actually dislodge herself from her position. Heat flooded her cheeks and his grin only grew bigger as he flipped through more of the pages.

“You didn’t just mention me more than once, love. I’m on most of these pages. You were practically obsessed with me.”

“Annoyed. That’s the word you were looking for. I was annoyed with you. When I wasn’t terrified of you.”

Nyrunn lowered the journal, setting it to the side and leaning over her. “What about now?”

“What do you mean?”

His thumb brushed her cheek. “You know what I’m asking. What do you think about me now?”

“I think…” Idonea didn’t have anything more that she could give him than this. “I think I’m really going to miss you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

She shook her head. “Not in this life. In the next.”

Something flared in the bond, and then Nyrunn was pulling her up so she sat across from him. His hands wrapped around her wrists as he held her there. “There has to be a way to make this life your last. I’ve read every journal. Every horrific detail. I can’t stomach what’s already been done to you. How can you be so calm about going through all of this agony again and again?”

“I… It’s all I have.”

“What?”

Idonea took a deep breath. “I mean, you said it yourself. You’ve read every journal. Even before that, you knew how my story has ended the last six times. Painfully. I’ve never lived to see fifty. Every time I think I’m getting close—that this time will be the last time and I’ll finally get to live a whole life and not a half. It’s not like I want to be brutally murdered.”

“What do you want, love?”

Idonea squeezed her eyes shut as the tears welled up in them. “I want—I want to live long enough to get wrinkles. I want to grow old with my husband. I want children who are so loved no one can use the human blood they get from me against them. I want to sing lullabies to my baby that my mother sang to me, but that was over a thousand years ago and those songs are all dead . It’s… Everything dies, even me. But I have to keep coming back to live with it all over again.”

Idonea furiously tried to wipe away her tears, dislodging Nyrunn’s hands. “I never wanted this. I never wanted seven lives. I don’t want eight. I’ve only ever wanted one. Just one good life. Where I’m loved. But the longer I live, the farther away it seems. I don’t—I can give you my journals, but I can never make you understand what it’s like. Coming back again and again. Everyone I have ever cared about, I have lost. Including in this life, my own soulmate, the one person I am forever bound to. You were right. I should never have lived this long.”

She opened her mouth, ready to confide in him her fears about the possibility she might hurt him, but her voice died as her hands were pulled away from her face. His palms replaced them, cupping her cheeks and forcing her to look at him as he wiped away the tears with his thumb. Her breath caught in her throat. “I would never wish for you to have endured everything you’ve been through, but I cannot pretend I am not immensely grateful for the fact that long, terrible road was what brought you to me.”

Idonea couldn’t hold back her sobs anymore. They came crashing out of her lips, and Nyrunn wrapped his arms around her and crushed her to him. He whispered in her ear as he stroked her hair, “I promise you, you’re going to have everything you want. You will.”

Idonea only cried harder because when she did, it wouldn’t be perfect because he wouldn’t be in her life anymore.