Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1)(78)

But she had never been one to believe in such things. Her gaze snagged on Roman’s bag, lying in the center of the floor. He had been so insistent that she grab his bag after he had been injured. She could still hear his voice, vividly.

Iris … my bag … I need you … need to get my bag. There’s something … I want you—

The world stopped.

The roaring in her ears returned, as if she had just crouched through an hour of artillery fire.

Carver’s letter slipped from her fingers as she walked to Roman’s bag. She bent down and retrieved it, dried dirt cascading in clumps from the leather. It took her a minute to get the front untethered. Her fingers were icy, fumbling. But at last it was open and she turned it upside down.

All his possessions began to spill out.

A wool blanket, a few tins of vegetables and pickled fruits. His notepad, full of his handwriting. Pens. A spare set of socks. And then the paper. So many loose pages, fluttering like snow down to the floor. Page after page, crinkled and folded and marked by type.

Iris stared at the paper that gathered at her feet.

She knew what this was. She knew as she dropped Roman’s bag, as she knelt to retrieve the pages.

They were her letters.

Her words.

First typed to Forest, and then to someone she had known as Carver.

Her emotions were a tangled mess as she began to reread them. Her words stung as if she had never once typed them sitting on the floor of her old bedroom, lonely and worried and angry.

I wish you would be a coward for me, for Mum. I wish you would set down your gun and rend your allegiance to the goddess who has claimed you. I wish you would return to us.

She had thought that Carver had thrown away the very first of her letters. She had asked him to send them back to her, and he had said it wasn’t possible.

Well, now she knew he was lying. Because they were here. They were all here, wrinkled as if they had been read numerous times.

Iris stopped reading. Her eyes were smarting.

Roman Kitt was Carver.

He had been Carver all along, and this realization struck her so hard she had to sit down on the floor. She was overwhelmed by a startling rush of relief. It was him. She had been writing to him, falling for him, all this time.

But then the questions began to swarm, nipping at that solace.

Had he been playing her? Was this a game to him? Why hadn’t he told her sooner?

She covered her face, and her palms absorbed the heat of her cheeks.

“Gods,” she whispered through her fingers, and when she opened her eyes again, her sight had sharpened. She stared at her letters, spread around her. And she began to gather them up, one by one.





{34}





C.


Iris walked into the infirmary ten minutes later, wearing a fresh jumpsuit and a tightly cinched belt. Her hair remained a tangled, hopeless mess around her shoulders, but she had more important things on her mind. All her letters were folded and in hand as she rode the lift to the upper level.

The doors chimed.

She stepped into the corridor, passing a few nurses and one of the doctors, none of whom paid her any attention, and she was glad for it. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, was about to unfold, but her blood was thrumming.

Her face was flushed by the time she approached Roman’s room.

He was in the same curtained bay and bed. His hand was still hooked to an intravenous tube, and his right leg was freshly bandaged, but he was sitting upright, his attention focused on the bowl of soup he was eating.

Iris stood on the threshold and watched him, her heart softening to see him awake. He wasn’t as pale as he had been the day before. She was relieved that he looked much better, and he swallowed a spoonful of soup, his eyes closing briefly as if savoring the food.

Iris felt the perspiration begin to bead on her palms, soaking into her letters. She hid them behind her back and walked to him, coming to a stop at the foot of his bed.

Roman glanced up and startled at the sight of her. He dropped his spoon with a clatter, rushing to set the bowl on his side table.

“Iris.”

She heard the joy in his voice. His eyes drank her in, and when he made to move—was he truly trying to rise and come to her on one leg?—she cleared her throat.

“Stay where you are, Kitt.”

He froze. A frown creased his brow.

She had rehearsed what she wanted to say to him. How to begin this strange conversation. She had pounded it into her mind the entire walk here. But now that she was looking at him … the words vanished within her.

She held up her handful of letters. And she said, “You.”

Roman was silent for a beat. He drew a deep breath and whispered, “Me.”

Iris smiled, a shield for how mortified she was. She felt like laughing and crying, but she forced them both down. Her head began to ache. “All this time, you were receiving my letters?”

“Yes,” Roman replied.

“I just … I can’t believe this, Kitt!”

“Why? What’s so hard to believe, Iris?”

“All this time it was you.” She blinked away her tears and tossed one of the letters onto Roman’s bed. It was satisfying, to hear the paper crinkle, a distraction from her embarrassment. She dropped another page, and then another. The letters fell onto his lap.

“Stop it, Iris,” Roman said, gathering them up as they drifted. As she carelessly crinkled them. “I understand why you’re angry at me, but let me expl—”