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When he came, his mask slipped. He met her eyes for a moment before he buried his face against her shoulder, and she saw all the heartbreak in him. Afterwards he held her close, not letting go.
We don’t get to choose when we’ve done enough and leave others behind to bear the consequences.
“Being alive is not the same as living. I hope someday you’ll have a chance to realise the difference.”
“Because I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the entire Order of the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat, it’s a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them. Given that the risk to their lives is the only way to make you value your own.”
He pushed into her and she caught his face in her hands, pulling him close so that their noses and foreheads brushed, her fingers trembling. I love you. It was right at the tip of her tongue, but she hesitated, biting the words back.
She had made this possible. She had not saved him; she had created a new way to lose him instead.
She stared at him, and her pathetic, starved heart leapt for a moment before she realised the obvious. This wasn’t Luc; this was the opium talking.
Al final si era Luc
They were always running out of time. Someday, she promised herself, someday I am going to love him in a moment that isn’t stolen.
She wanted to commit everything to memory, the way he felt under her hands and against her skin, as if sufficient detail could make this secret thing real enough to endure; as if she could write it into the universe so deeply that even a war could not erase it.
He said nothing else. When she looked up, his eyes were unseeing, the dawn reflecting in the empty blue.
“This whole war was just two brothers fighting over who gets to play god?” Kaine gave a disbelieving, bitter laugh. “You think you’re picking a side, and you’re just on the opposite end of the same fucking coin.”
“Helena…” He said her name slowly, a note of warning but also a plea in the way he said it.
“If I don’t come back—if you ever see Kaine, tell him—tell him that I—” Her head dropped down, and she quickly brushed her fingertips across her cheeks. She cleared her voice and shook her head. “Never mind. I imagine he knows.”
If she didn’t go back, he’d return to find a mess of hastily assembled explosives and her scrawled note. I love you. I love you. I love you. She forced herself up. She wasn’t going to die. She wouldn’t leave him behind. She had to go back.
He was alive. She’d kept him alive. That was what she’d wanted but— Not like this.
She had so many questions, though. What happened? Why didn’t you come? Why did you hurt me? Why did you rape me? Why did you become High Reeve? “Why—” Her voice broke. “—why did you kill everyone?” He seemed startled by the question, as if he’d expected one of the others. “I was trying to find you.”
In the process of forgetting, she’d flattened herself, forgotten all her anger. Her capacity to be monstrous.
“You are,” she said. “I feel like I know you are, but I don’t remember why.”
[angry]
They’d found each other once, after all. With time, they could do it again.
She stood there, watching the space around her disappear into shadows. It was haunted after all. She had been the ghost.
In his search for her, he’d let it consume him.
What must it be like to be stuck with this version of her when she used to be so much more? She couldn’t even fully remember and still found it intolerable.
Even though she didn’t want him to touch her, she felt desperate for him to hold her again. Her mind and body were at perpetual odds.
He could not occupy the impossible in-between where she wanted him because there was no distance large enough to erase what had happened that still left him within her reach.
He was always cruellest when he was vulnerable.
“Is this not enough? There are, undoubtedly, still unexplored depths to the potential misery between us. Shall we endeavour to achieve all of it?”
“You always said you wouldn’t choose me over everyone else. I am chained to a sinking ship. I will not take you with me.” “I was lying!” The words came out a scream.
“You didn’t save me,” he said when he was finally capable of speech. “You just put us in hell for two years.”
He’d loved her, even though he never expected them to be anything but doomed. He’d loved her all the same.
I have to go without you—if you—if you die—I’d want to tell them all about you.” She swallowed hard. “I’ve never gotten to tell anyone about you. I’d want someone to know what you were like.”
I left a note. Didn’t you get my note? I love you.” He flinched as if struck and started to shake his head, but she stilled him, forcing him to meet her eyes. “I do,” she said more firmly, her voice shaking with intensity. “I love you. And I always will. Always.” She rose up on her toes, pulling him closer, and kissed him. He stayed frozen when her lips touched his. “I love you,” she said the words against his mouth, as if breathing them into him. He was still a moment longer and then shook, his palms cradling her face, fingers tangled in her hair, pulling her closer, his mouth burning as he
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“I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m so sorry for everything I did to you,” he said, his voice hoarse and broken. “I love you. You left, and I’d never told you.”
Bb hermoso :'(((((
“Tell me to stop,” he said, his mouth over her throat. “Tell me to stop.” She pulled him closer. “Don’t stop. I don’t want you to stop.”
Her hands trailed along the curve of his jaw, down over his shoulders, as the physical memory of him awakened beneath her skin.
She rested her head on his shoulder, entwining her arm with his as they sat there in the lengthening dark, amid the ruins of all they’d once been. They just needed more time.
“I want this,” she said, voice shaking. “I want this on our terms before I go—please…” Her voice cracked. “This was ours…” She swallowed, blinking hard. “They took it from us, but it was ours.”
When she tried to picture home, this feeling was all she could imagine.
Ellos juntitos
I thought that we could suffer enough to earn each other.”
Helena had never had that kind of allure. She didn’t know if she could be a good mother, or if wanting to keep this baby wasn’t just her selfishness rearing its head. Her inability to let go. To love someone. To be needed.
Night fell and Lumithia was little more than a sliver of light, as if the night sky were a black curtain concealing the daylight, and someone had pierced it with a knife.
They’d used up all their luck surviving this long. Half a day short, and it had run out.
You loved her right into her grave.”
The sky was silvering with signs of dawn when Amaris landed again.
He leaned over her and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around his neck, wanting him nearer, under her skin, beneath her ribs, inside her heart. To hoard him so close nothing separated them and the terror of losing him would finally end.
“We have to stop hurting ourselves for each other,” she finally said. “Both of us. We’re not going to last if this is the only way we know how to love.”
There was enough in this room to keep her busy for a lifetime. That was what the room was, a life Kaine had tried to set her up with. She wanted to appreciate the effort it must have required, but it felt all wrong. Too perfect. As if it were all a trap set specifically to lure her in and lull her with a false sense of safety.
“I think I always saw running away as the destination. I never actually thought about what would be left of me by the time I got here.”
He closed the shutters, and Helena collapsed in bed. The linens were soft and airy from the sea breeze, and it was like coming home.
Soy
She studied him sadly, realising their difference: He didn’t have any dreams about what he’d do or be after the war. He had never even allowed for the possibility. He had no idea how to do anything but be a soldier.
She brought a few books over and laced her fingers with his as she read, and he was asleep again in minutes.
Somos
