Pushing back from his chair, he walked over and looked out the window. He nearly busted out of his skin when he heard the door creep open anyway.
“Unless there is another fire, I do not want to be disturbed,” he called out harshly.
The darker magic within him pulsed, aching to find a weak spot and destroy whoever dared enter his domain uninvited.
“I blew up half the parapet last week.” Every part of him went stiff as a board, and yet a deep, intrinsic part of him relaxed as the voice continued. “Does that count?”
Turning, needing to catch sight of her, he froze as an uncomfortable feeling fluttered in his chest. He shoved his hands into the front pockets of his breeches and stared at her.
His former assistant looked the same, still short, still dark-haired. Still with eyes that seemed to know too much and lips that were constantly pulling up at the corners. He went longer than this on the week’s ends when he didn’t see her, so the reaction his body was having was ridiculous.
But he was so happy to see her. What an obscene, unnecessary emotion, but there it was. He was happy… How positively vile.
And the lightness in his chest only grew when she began to speak. “I don’t like feeling as if I can’t do something.” The words tumbled out of her mouth, not practiced but honest.
“All right…” he said neutrally.
“It makes me irrational. It’s like it triggers something in me that—”
“Stop.” He held a hand up to interrupt her, looking over her shoulder to the open door. “Hold that thought.” He moved swiftly toward it, noting the crowd of onlookers trying to peek around the doorway, all dispersing when he glared.
All but Blade, who wandered by with yet another bandage on his head, noticing Sage and turning back to Trystan with a small fist pump.
Trystan flipped him off before closing the door and turning to Kingsley, who sat unmoving on his desk. At least he wasn’t holding up his earlier sign again.
“Could you go be…anywhere else?” Trystan asked, and when the creature hopped off the desk and over two feet to land on the windowsill, he sighed, then looked to Sage. “Proceed.”
“I know there are things you don’t want to trust me with. I even know there are things that I just can’t accomplish.”
He fiercely doubted that but didn’t say anything.
She moved to her regular seat; he chose to remain standing, leaning against his desk. “But not being able to take care of what I need to, of the people I need to… It terrifies me.”
His curiosity was piqued as his brows shot up in surprise.
Surely this woman didn’t really believe herself incapable of anything. Besides, she knew his overreaction and treatment of her was wrong, that he’d been wrong about the letter. So why was she explaining herself?
“I know that I can’t know everything, and I respect it. You’re a man with many secrets, unlike me.” She laughed a little at the end, the self-deprecating kind—he knew it well.
She continued, her light eyes finding his dark ones, and Trystan flexed his hands nervously at his sides to alleviate the almost ticklish feeling spreading through his limbs. “But when you accused me of being deceitful…”
Trystan’s shoulders straightened.
“It hurt me. You didn’t even give me the chance to explain.”
It hurt me.
He wondered if it would scar her for life if he threw himself from the window.
“However.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have quit so abruptly. My emotions got the better of me, and it was not a decision I would have made, had I given myself the opportunity to process that hurt appropriately.”
She took a deep breath, her gaze remaining steady on him. “For that, I sincerely apologize and ask you to allow me my job back.”
A silence echoed as they stared at each other. Trystan realized his lips had parted as she was speaking, and he was currently gaping at her like a deranged fish. Swallowing, he moved his jaw back and forth, trying to ease the stiffness. “You want to come back?”
The eagerness in his voice needed to be squashed under his boot like a roach.
She nodded, eyes glinting as the last dregs of sunlight spilled in. “I really love working here.”
He should leave it there. Both of them acknowledging he was in the right, that she had been absurd, and letting the pieces of their lives fall back together unencumbered.
It hurt me.
Guilt. He was feeling guilt in a harsh, raw way, and he couldn’t stand it. To see her sitting there looking open and reasonable, a courageous hope surrounding her. It grated against his skin, caused a pounding in the front of his skull.