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I couldn’t tell him that I loved him.
And the worst part was, it wasn’t even because it wasn’t true! Looking at Dalk, so proud and powerful and in so much fucking pain, wanting to go to him so badly, wanting to be with him, to comfort him and support him and hating the idea of being separated from him, I knew with cutting clarity that there was no way this wasn’t love.
I’d told him I was worried we were falling in love, but apparently I’d been completely in denial, because it seemed like the fall had already happened, so easy and painless I hadn’t felt the impact. I’d hit the ground without even knowing it. Just like the fall I’d taken in the cave earlier, I was now lying flat on my back staring up at where I’d once been wondering just how the hell I’d gotten here.
And Dalk was with me.
But I couldn’t tell him that now. Not when he was in such turmoil and needing to focus on himself and his family. Not when he was about to leave and it would feel like a selfish, desperate plead for him to stay.
So I said something else instead. Something much easier to get out of my tight throat, but no less true.
“I’ll be waiting.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dalk
Iwondered if this was how Ark moved through the world now that his eyes had been damaged. I walked as if through mist, nothing seeming real or solid as I got into the shuttle with Valeria and Grim.
She and Grim were largely silent as the craft ascended. I was silent, too, the dull blade of grief chipping away at me in messy strokes when I thought of Taraken.
It sharpened when I thought of Fiona.
I would never, in all my life, forget the way she’d looked at me, crying her human tears for me, asking to come with me mere moments after she’d tried to pull herself out of reach. So terribly tender-hearted she was.
But not so tender-hearted that she would not hurt me.
She still wanted me. She’d said that much, at least. But she’d also said many other things. About how she would not leave her friends. About how she would not let me kill the one meant to be her mate.
About how she feared that we were running headlong into ruin.
She said she did not know how to go on. She did not know how to be with me without the security of the mate bond. It did not matter to her that I already felt that bond, felt it hard inside me, potent as blood and enduring as bone.
She would not have me if the Lavrika did not call me. And she would not have me if the Lavrika called me for someone else.
She was all I wanted and it did not seem to be enough.
My fist slammed into the floor of the shuttle. I gritted my teeth, enjoying the distracting thrum of pain and the metal-bang sound it had made. Valeria and Grim looked at each other, but they said nothing.
Slowly, I relaxed my hand from the aching fist, grasping my spear and squeezing it. I’d told Fiona that I needed to go back into the Sea Sands alone. But here I was, dragging her with me inside my own head and making myself all the more miserable for it.
My uncle was owed better. He was owed better than a nephew so stuffed with longing that there was no more room inside left for anything else.
Even now, as I tried to think of what Taraken’s death might mean, the swallowing sorrow of it, it felt dismal and distant. Like a far-off point blurred on the horizon, beyond the ripping agony of Fiona, the cut of having her so cursedly close, only to feel myself begin to lose her.
I have lost two people tonight.
Perhaps only one of them was ever mine at all.
The shuttle made short work of what would have been a days-long journey, and it was just before dawn that we landed at the settlement in the Sea Sands. At first this confused me, until it was explained that Taraken had been brought out of Gahn Fallo’s territory to see the healers at the settlement. It hadn’t done any good, though. He had suffered a great wound, gored by a dakrival while hunting, and no amount of Lavrika’s blood or medicine from the new women had been able to keep the killing fever away.
All of this was told to me by Gahnala Chapman, the fire-haired leader of the new women at this settlement and mate to my Gahn. She led me into a new enclosure that must have been built after I’d left. Instead of a tent resting directly upon the sand, it was raised up high, requiring one to step up onto a babkit-wood platform that formed the smooth floor of the large, flat-topped, hide-walled enclosure.
I froze upon entering the strange structure, my claws digging into the wood beneath my feet. Taraken was there, resting on a bed of hides in the centre of the room. There were odd contraptions belonging to the new women littering the space, presumably meant for healing, but none of them seemed to be in use. They had all been pushed off to the sides, nearer the walls, as if silently acknowledging that even their otherworldly powers would be of no use to my uncle now.
“We’ve got him very comfortable,” Gahnala Chapman said. “Our painkillers work pretty well for you guys, it turns out.”
I was not certain what a painkiller was, but I was glad that Taraken was not suffering. He did not even seem to be fully asleep. At the sound of Chapman’s voice, his head turned slowly towards us and he opened his eyes.
