Page 31 of The Last War We Ever Fought

“You have one?”

He grinned at her as he backed towards the exit. “Can’t you hear it? It’s practically screaming out your name.” Placing a hand on his chest, he feigned surprise, lowering his hand to feel around, lower and lower as if he couldn’t find a heartbeat. “Wait a minute. I don’t think it was my heart.”

Quickly, before he could lower his hand any further, she reached for her dagger and threw it at him. Albeit very clumsily because he easily leaned to his side, letting it pass by, but that would have made it exactly her sixth attempt on his life.

He laughed, and for a second, when she looked away from him, he thought he saw her smile.

It might have been then. Maybe even before. Elijah was falling. He didn’t know exactly where or why. He’d never been a man of many questions anyway, so that mattered very little to him.

It didn’t take long for him to accept it.

He was falling.

Again.

War couldn’t fall.

He’d take everything with him.

“Aren’t you cold out there?” she suddenly asked.

“If you’re offering to hug me, then yes—yes I am very cold.”

Ever so slowly, a smile curled up her lips. “I have no dagger to throw.”

“I’ll consider you threw it anyway.”

She nodded, resting her chin on top of her knees as she watched him.

There had never been such a time where his heart had felt the way it did at that moment. So heavy, so restless. “I don’t think I can leave, Rowan. I don't know what to do.”

“Then don’t,” she said, her voice small.

“Repeat it again for me. I don’t think my ears believed it.”

“Don’t leave, Elijah. If you’re mine to kill, that would make you my hostage. Hostages can’t be free.”

“No, we can’t be,” he agreed, carefully taking a seat on the stool again. “I’ve always wondered what you do here alone.”

She sighed and laid back down, blinking up at her fabric ceiling that fluttered and quivered at the touch of the wind and rain outside. “Waste time.”

“How can time be wasted?”

“By waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

She turned her eyes to him. “The end. Not death. Just the end. The end of the day. The end of my headache. The end of this rain. The end of this war.”

“An interesting hobby for certain.”

Again, she smiled at him. “And you? What do you do out there?”

“I also wait.”

“For what?”

Her. “You,” he confessed. Elijah was not a man to shy away from making known what he wanted.