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“My shadows.”
He smiled but shook his head, gently pushing the hair away from my face. “I didn’t give you those.”
“But you did—in the way that matters, you did.”
“That’s all you, baby. I just walked you through the fear of it.”
“Fear held me captive for twenty-nine years. It suffocated my potential my entire life. Still does.”
He snorted, disbelief pinching his brows. “You’re lying on iridescent soil wedged between two potentially fatal enchantments, having traversed a desert designed to test your sanity, surviving venomous snakes hellbent on eating you, psychedelic scorpions, and a demon dragon.”
“Well, when you say it that way,” I scoffed. “Doesn’t mean I wasn’t pissing myself the whole time.”
“If you think any legend is born with the stories cast across our skies, you missed the point of the fables. No hero starts that way. They simply stare fear in the eyes and say, ‘get fucked’ enough times that people take notice.”
“Is that what you do? What you did in there today?”
“Every day since my father put a blade in my hand at twelve.” Gods. He’d been just a little boy.
“I hate that for you.”
He shrugged, but the thoughtfulness in his eyes belied the nonchalance. “Destiny beckons. We answer. I was always fated to be The Commander. For whatever reason, that was my path. The suffering of my childhood, my father’s attempt to sell my sister, my capture in her stead… it all forged the man Grayshell needed a few short centuries later. Without it, who would I have been?”
One gentle finger brushed across my brow, his expression melting. “I’m proud of you, Mags.” Before I could argue, he shook his head. “For all of it. For owning your choices—your path. I don’t have to agree with everything you’ve ever done or said to acknowledge that you operate the best you can with the information you have. Your convictions don’t waver in the bleakest circumstances, no matter who suffers within them—friend or foe—and for that, you have my respect. You don’t need it. You are a fair and just Heiress all on your own. But you have it regardless.” Every word drove home like a blade, but some niggling corner of my mind couldn’t ignore the way his tone sounded almost like… goodbye. I didn’t like it.
Aren continued, “You have it for doing what you believed was right for your people. You have it for seeking truth when others only act in anger. You have it for being a damn bold bitch when you need to be.”
“Bold isn’t the word I had in mind.”
“Yeah, well, ask Jason how he’d describe the tiny witch that bodily threw herself between him and a goddamn bear.”
“That’s different.”
“Baby, I know warriors who wouldn’t have stood in front of a freshly shifted fourteen-foot monster like that.”
“It wasn’t a monster,” I said simply, shrugging one shoulder. The next words came out on nervous laughter at the insanity of it all. “It was you.” I moved my hand from his face to his chest, feeling the steady thrum of his pulse beneath my fingers. “My Aren. You would never hurt me.”
For a beat, his brows pinched, one hand settling limply across my collarbone as he looked skyward and blinked hard. With a jagged sigh, he collapsed onto his back and took my hand with him. Aren tucked me against his side, his swallow audible in the darkness.
“You say that with a great deal of certainty.”
“Because you wouldn’t.”
I shifted, settling on his bicep and not giving a damn about the crook in my neck. I cared even less when he wrapped that arm tightly around my shoulders, fastening me to his side as though I were an extension of his ribcage. My eyes slipped closed as I breathed him in, relishing that familiar parchment-and-petrichor scent.
I’d had everything, and it still hadn’t been enough to make me feel safe. But… he hadn’t felt safe enough to be real with me either.
At last, Aren breathed, “Why’d you do it?”
“You could’ve told me.” The accusation came out sharp but small, as though the words wanted to crawl back over the terrain of my teeth and tuck themselves into some shadowed place where they couldn’t drive him away again.
“I should’ve.”
“So… why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know, dove…” A silence settled, so heavy it made my chest ache, before he admitted, “I was scared.” A million unsaid things wrapped around my chest with those three words while his fingers traced a soothing circuit over the back of my hand. It was hard to imagine this man—the legend, The Commander, the prophesied Warrior—afraid of anything. Much less… me. When he spoke, it wasn’t the answer I was looking for. Hell, it wasn’t an answer at all. “Why’d you come back?”
I scoffed, grateful I could study the slow rise and fall of his chest. Looking at his face might’ve broken me to pieces. “I was scared,” I echoed.
