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“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s blood on you.”
“Oh, God, don’t worry about that!” I cried, glancing down at myself in bewilderment. Who the hell cared if my pyjamas had gotten a little dirty?
Apparently, Silar did. As soon as his hands were clean, he grabbed a spare cloth, soaked it with water, and stroked it with dutiful reverence across my cheek, then my eyebrow, then my ear.
“I didn’t realize there was some on my face,” I murmured, leaning into his touch despite the cold shock of the water.
Silar didn’t speak. He just kept caressing my skin, thorough and tender, until my face, ear, and neck were completely wiped down.
He looked as if he was going to try to dab at the red splatters on my shirt, but I shook my head wearily.
“I’ll soak it,” I told him, already shrugging out of the garment. “Though, even so, I don’t know if the stains are going to come out.”
Silar looked pained by this, his expression contracting. I gave him a wan smile. “It’s alright. I’ll just cut it up and add it to the bandage pile. We’re already going to need some new ones on your tail.” That whole catching the knife out of the air trick had re-opened Silar’s wounds. Black blood seeped through the white strips.
I couldn’t be bothered dealing with the whole laundry tub, so instead I just filled the sink and shoved my pyjama shirt into it, deciding I’d deal with it in the morning.
When Silar finally spoke, it wasn’t to answer my earlier question about if he was alright. It was to murmur, with a raw ache in his voice, “You’re shaking.”
I crossed my arms over my bare chest, shivering violently.
“I’m cold,” I said, voice cracking.
“I’ll build up the fire and-”
“No Silar. Please. Just… Just come to bed with me.” Tears filled my eyes, and I did my best to blink them away. “Tonight… Tonight was so hard. And I just really need my husband with me.”
A fresh batch of tears filled my eyes, and my face collapsed in a soundless sob. With my eyes scrunched shut, I didn’t see Silar coming. Just felt him lift me. Felt the solid support of his arms cradling me. The bone-deep comfort of his body’s warmth.
I turned my head against his chest, weeping in the quiet of our house. This bout of crying didn’t last long, though. By the time Silar laid me carefully on the bed and covered me in the blanket, I felt emptied of tears. Emptied of almost everything, really.
But not emptied of love for the man kneeling at the end of the bed and gently prying my boots from my feet. He placed my boots down, then kicked off his own. After peeling off his trousers, he slid under the blanket with me.
His body was a balm to mine. His presence an antidote to every wound I never knew I had. The violent tremble of my muscles instantly ceased when he wrapped his arms around me and brought me to him. We faced each other, front to front in the embers of the dying kitchen firelight.
“So,” Silar said, brushing a stray, damp hair away from my face. He took a moment to rub it between his fingers and his thumb, as if savouring the sensation. “Now you know.”
“Now I know?”
“About me,” he said. His jaw worked, but his eyes were back to blue and they stayed that way. “About my past.”
“About this whole murder conviction thing?” I blew a raspberry, trying to dispel some of the tension creeping back into my spine. “Yeah. That was a doozy. But you weren’t the only one keeping secrets. I never told you about why I came here. What I was running from.”
“You did not come here because you wanted to get married.”
There was no hurt in his voice, no accusation, but I reacted with a virulent need to deny it.
“That’s not… That’s not exactly true. I mean, the circumstances of my coming here certainly weren’t ideal. I had no money, no family left after Mama died. I had nowhere to go, and I was desperate and in danger, and then I saw the ad for the bride program…”
I paused, closing my eyes for a moment, because everything I was saying wasn’t making any of this sound any better. I opened my eyes once more to find Silar gazing at me steadily, not a hint of anger or betrayal on his face. And that just made me feel even worse.
“I may not have come here with the sole reason of getting married, no. But I need you to know that, from the moment I first saw you, I knew that I was lucky to be marrying you. When I saw you treat Tarion so well through the window when you thought that no one was watching, I thought to myself, ‘That is a good man.’ And I also need you to know,” I added fiercely, cupping his hard jaw with my hands, “that no matter how things started between us, my feelings for you, here and now, are real. Everything I said to you earlier tonight is true. I’m in this for the long haul, Silar. I’m in this forever,” I gulped. “If you’ll have me, that is.”
He was quiet for a heart-battering moment before he answered.
“I do not care why you came here. I do not care if you lied, cheated, or stole your way into this world. I do not care what you were running from.” His eyes grew white slowly, brightening from the aqua veins outward. “All I care about is that, if you are running, I’m the one you run to.”
He brushed his knuckles slowly across my cheek, his voice growing even quieter in the hushed bed. “Run your way down any road you wish to, Cherry. But I’ll always be the one standing there at the end of it.”
