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Still holding Tallak up by his collar with one hand, Rhun exhaled heavily. “Fucking deserve it, you twit.”
Tallak’s short laugh sounded like a rusty pipe breaking apart. “Yeah,” he said, his voice devoid of any amusement. “I do.”
“Why are you running?” Rhun’s fist tightened in his shirt.
Tallak rubbed a hand over his face, everything inside him weary, wrung out, hopeless. “I fucked it up.”
“With Hazel?”
He nodded and wiped more blood out of his eyes. “I hurt her. Bad.” He shook his head, the movement sparking pain in his temples. “She’ll never forgive me.”
“Did you hit her?”
The fury roaring up inside him almost launched him off the wall. With a punch to his face, he shoved Rhun off him. “Fuck you!”
The bluotezzer stumbled back, caught himself, and fixed his nose with a quick yank and a grimace. “All right, all right,” he said a bit nasally. “Just wanted to make sure we’re not talking about that kind of hurt.”
Tallak’s only answer was a snarl.
Rhun eyed him from a few feet away. “So you had a fight.”
“A fucking bad one.”
“And now you just give up? Just like that?” The light of the streetlamp outside the window reflected in Rhun’s blue-green eyes, making them gleam like a cat’s. “One fight, and you tuck your tail and run for the hills? I thought you loved her.” Rhun glared at him and bared his teeth, a bit of fang peeking through. “Where’s your courage, you fucking coward? You don’t run when it gets tough. You buckle the fuck up and ride out the storm!”
“You don’t understand,” Tallak growled. “I broke her trust. The things I said—I cut her right where it hurt the most. She won’t be able to move past it. There’s no way to fix that.”
“Yes, there is.” Rhun pointed at him, his eyes hard. “You fucking grovel.”
Tallak scoffed, but the look on Rhun’s face made him shut his mouth.
“You think I don’t know what I’m talking about?” Rhun’s voice was quiet, the buzz of his energy charging the room. “Before Merle and I were mated, when the whole thing with Maeve and Isabel went down, I took her powers.”
Tallak blinked. “What?”
Rhun balled his hands into fists. “I stole Merle’s magic in a moment when she trusted me. She thought she was safe with me, and I betrayed that trust and robbed her of her very essence. I took her powers because it was in my fucking nature to do so, even if I didn’t mean to.”
Tallak sucked in a sharp breath. A witch without her powers…was like a bird with clipped wings. It would have been a pain that went soul-deep, made her feel like she’d lost her very identity.
“And she still mated with you?” he asked, his voice raw.
Rhun shook his head. “Not right then. She ran from me, scared for her life.” Old pain glinted in Rhun’s eyes, his expression tortured. “She thought I wanted to kill her.”
Tallak swallowed. “How did you come back from that? How did you make her trust you again?”
A muscle feathered in Rhun’s jaw. “I chased her down, caught her, and groveled as if my life depended on it. Because it did. I knew if she didn’t forgive me, I’d never forgive myself, and the pain would kill me.”
Tallak studied him for a moment. “But she did forgive you.”
“Yeah. I apologized. Hard. I laid my soul bare for her. I made sure she saw that I meant it. When I say I groveled, I really mean it. I literally went down on my knees in front of her. I had to make her understand, feel that I was sorry for ever hurting her, and that I’d rather go back to the Shadows for the rest of my life than hurt her again.”
Rubbing his face, Tallak exhaled roughly.
“If you really love her,” Rhun said, “you don’t leave her like this. You go over there and fucking fix this. Give her the grovelliest grovel that ever groveled, you hear me?” He poked a finger into Tallak’s chest. “I didn’t invest blood, sweat, and good whiskey into this friendship for you to skip town at the first sign of trouble, you weaselly chicken.”
“Fuck you,” Tallak said with a smile, the words holding no heat.
“Fuck you, too, jackass.”
