Page 113 of Thief of Hearts

That should have made me want to drive a sword through his throat. Why didn’t it?

He crunched into his apple again. When he was done chewing, he said, “There’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

“I know what you’ve been thinking about.” He hadn’t been subtle.

“Not that. Well, yes, obviously I think about you and that constantly, but that’s not what I’m talking about. When you first woke up in the Wastelands—”

I interrupted him. “After you drugged and bound me?”

He brushed past that. “You tried to call on your goddess’s fighting aspect, didn’t you? And it didn’t work.”

I nodded.

“Have you tried again since then?”

“Why would I?”

“You should try it,” he said. “I’m curious.”

“This may surprise you but I don’t live to satisfy your curiosity.”

“Very well aware,” he said in that tone that gave me butterflies. “But we’re not doing anything else and you might need that aspect in the future.”

I hadn’t considered that. All the people I’d met who were battle-favored or goddess-blessed didn’t have other abilities, with one exception. I knew that the goddess-blessed priestess named Antiope from Lia’s temple had attempted to invoke a power of her goddess and had been successful, but the weight of using it had knocked her out and so she’d decided to focus her time on her natural power.

What if this made me strong enough to defeat the Daemonian guards? It was worth trying.

“If I attack you, I’m sorry.” Not that I thought Zain deserved an apology, but I had no idea what this aspect might do.

“Why are you apologizing for something that hasn’t even happened yet?”

“Because when you do something wrong or make a mistake, you apologize,” I said pointedly. “Like how I apologized to you repeatedly after I used Invara’s fertility aspect.”

“You didn’t need to.”

“I thought I had scared you. I thought I had done some irreparable harm to you that night.”

He let out a short bark of laughter. “If every woman who had ever straddled me did irreparable harm, I would be . . .”

His voice trailed off as if he suddenly remembered who he was talking to. “I wasn’t upset with you that night. I was upset with myself.”

Finally, something that felt real.

“Why?”

“Because I knew what I was going to do to you the next day and I . . . didn’t deserve to be with you. Even though I wanted to, more than anything.”

That Lia voice from last night echoed in my head.

He feels bad. He wants your forgiveness. He just doesn’t think that he deserves it.

“Do you want forgiveness?”

Surprise lit up his features. “Are you offering it?”

“Should I? You don’t seem interested in it.”

“I am sorry that I hurt you,” he said, and my heart stopped beating for one moment. “I didn’t want to do that. That I feel bad about.”