“There’s my star,” he said, folding the scrap of cloth in his hands. He flattened it against his open palm, reaching forward as he held my stare in a silent challenge. Sliding it between my thighs, he used it to clean the evidence of his pleasure from my skin. Never glancing down at what he did or where he touched me, he quirked a brow when I refused to flinch from the sensitivity between my legs. “See how brightly you burn when you lean into all that hatred in your heart? Think of what you could do if you didn’t waste it on the one person in this world who loves you more than anything.”
He tossed the scrap of fabric to the ground, straightening his pants and retying the laces. I stood pantless before him while he began to dress himself, glancing down at my missing clothing for a moment before I returned my attention to him. “I will never forget the man I thought you were, or how much I loved him. But I will spend the rest of my life trying to forget you ever existed.”
He winced as I crouched down to grab my pants, turning them right side out and shoving my legs into the holes. Yanking them up my legs until they settled around my hips, I did my best to ignore the flash of pain that I felt from him. It was dampened, as if it was my own emotion circled back at me, weaker but recognizable all the same.
“Don’t make me your villain,” he said, staring at me. With his shirt still lying on the ground beside him, his golden skin gleamed where the sun drifted over the horizon. The moon appeared in the twilight of the evening sky, dancing with the sun in a brief serenade before she would vanish for the night.
“You did that all on your own, Caldris,” I said, his name on my tongue feeling wrong in every way. He grimaced as if he agreed, even though it was his name in truth.
He heaved a sigh, bending down to angrily snatch his shirt from the ground as I sat in front of him and pulled on my socks and boots. He shoved it over his head, forcing his arms through the sleeves as his hair danced in the light breeze. “One day, you will realize that you know nothing of this world, Little One. A lesser male, a lesser mate, would leave you to rot in the misery you would create from your own ignorance.”
“But let me guess? You will never let me go,” I said, rising to my feet and standing before him. “That doesn’t sound like they’re lesser to me. It sounds like you’re just more selfish.”
His features twisted as he studied me, his top lip twitching as if an animalistic need to snarl threatened to break through his composure. “Is it selfish to protect you against your recklessness? Against how quick you are to judge me for something you do not even begin to understand? I told you once; I would burn the world for you if you so much as asked it of me. What do you think I would do if I lost you? What exactly do you think the purpose of a mate bond is? The witches created them to right the balance of the world—between the Fae and the humans—so that nothing was out of order. A mate is chosen to be our balance. You are my balance. Everything good that exists inside of me comes from you. If I lost you, you might as well burn the world to ash,” he said, stepping closer until he leaned over me. Forced to tip my head back to meet his gaze, I almost wished I hadn’t bothered. “So tell me again, Little One, am I the selfish one?”
He stared at me, his eyes glimmering as my own anger raised to match his frustration that rolled off of him in waves, coating the air with the sickly scent of death. I glanced over at Melian’s grave, the reminder of it causing something completely foreign to sweep over me, striking into my chest and threatening to knock me off my feet.
“You can’t put that on me,” I said, staring at him in horror. He couldn’t possibly mean to put the fate of the world on my shoulders. As if in rejecting him, I rejected the world and condemned it to a fate worse than death. He raised his arms, gesturing out to the city around us and the rubble of the streets and skeletal remains of buildings that had probably gleamed in magnificence during their prime.
“I ruined this city for vengeance over what they’d done to me. For the way they betrayed me. Is this what you want the world to look like? Is this your hope for your home and the people you claim to love and want to protect?” he asked, scoffing because he already knew the answer. He knew I would do what was necessary for the greater good, because where he didn’t care, I did.
“Of course not,” I said, shaking my head from side to side. Calfalls was devoid of life. It was death and decay and destruction. There wasn’t a single trace of humanity left, aside from the Fae Marked hiding in the rubble, so desperate for protection from the Fae that they would hide in a place where there was no food or water that wasn’t tainted by the ash of the city’s remains.
There was just nothing.
“You can’t use the world and this twisted sense of the greater good to force me to be with you. To make me love you. That’s not how it works, Caelum,” I said, my voice coming out strangled. He stepped closer, touching his hand to my cheek and cupping it gently. So at odds with the tension pulsing through his body, as if he was a moment away from exploding into a violent rage.
As if he was just a second from madness.
“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” he said, heaving out a sigh. He stroked his thumb over my cheekbone, his expression softening as he considered his words more carefully. “I have lived for centuries. I have seen what this world does to good things—to beautiful things. I have lived without kindness and been betrayed by people I should’ve been able to trust. This world is ugly and it is filled with brutality.” He paused to smile sadly down at me. “And then came you.”
Something in his expression made my heart flutter in my chest, threatening to cleave me in two with the bittersweet pain there. “Your essence flows down the bond between us—light and good, tainted by my darkness. But at your core, there is this well of beauty that flows from you. You don’t love easy, but you do love hard. And I have spent centuries feeling you fall in love with men who didn’t deserve you. Feeling your heart flutter for men who would never have been able to give you what your soul craved in the end, and knowing that, I was trapped on the other side of the Veil waiting for you. Just waiting for centuries to be able to hold you.”
“Caelum,” I protested, shaking my head to try to dislodge his grip.
He held me steady, staring down at me as if he needed me to hear the words I didn’t want to hear. “And then it broke, and I met you and you were everything I’d ever dreamed you would be and more. I felt you fall in love all over again, but with me this time. I see in your eyes that you wish you could take it back more than anything, but you can’t. Because you and I both know what you felt; we both know you loved me with everything you were. More than you ever loved your husbands in all your past lives. You still do, and you can’t wish that away, because you were born to love me, whether I deserve it or not.”
I studied him for a few moments, trying not to think about how it would feel if our roles were reversed. I couldn’t begin to fathom the idea of him entertaining another woman. The thought of it alone made a rage so unlike anything I had ever known burn through me. To feel that, and know it was love, over and over again for centuries, I didn’t know if I would survive. But I didn’t want sympathy for him or empathy for the situation he’d been forced into by some wicked play of fate at the hands of the witches.