Chapter 284
Chapter 284
Chapter 284
NINA
I’d been expecting to find Kael still planted at Ivory’s bedside when I arrived at the healing tent. The man had practically materialized there the moment they’d carried her in, and based on the reports filtering back through the pack, he’d been a fixed point in that curtained space for the better part of three hours. Security chief habits died hard, and I’d spent enough time reading rooms and tracking people’s movements that I clocked his absence immediately when I pushed through the curtain.
His scent was still warm in the air. Recent. Twenty minutes, maybe less. But the chair beside Ivory’s bed was empty, pushed back at an angle that suggested he’d risen quickly rather than easing out gradually.
Ivory was awake. That was the first thing that mattered. She was sitting up against the pillows with her knees drawn toward her chest and her arms wrapped around them, the posture of someone trying to make themselves smaller than they were. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the skin beneath them bruised and swollen from the hemorrhaging that had stopped hours ago but left its evidence in rust-colored tracks down both cheeks. Someone had wiped her face at some point, but they hadn’t gotten all of it, and the remnants gave her a hollowed, ravaged look I’d never seen on her before.
Ivory didn’t ravage easily. That was one of the truths I’d built my understanding of her around over twenty-some years of being her cousin, her friend, her occasional conscience when she couldn’t hear her own. She absorbed things. Processed them internally, metabolized them somehow, emerged on the other side with her competence intact even when she was quietly destroyed underneath. She’d done it through her parents’ deaths. Through Kael’s curse years. Through waking up without three years of her life and having to navigate a world that had moved forward without her.
This was different. This was the thing underneath all that competence, finally out in the open.
“Thought Kael would still be here,” I said, keeping my voice neutral as I pulled a stool close to the bed and settled onto it. Not assuming she wanted contact yet. Reading her posture, which said she was fragile in ways that needed careful handling.
“I told him to go.” Her voice was rough, the kind that came from crying hard and long, the kind that didn’t improve with small amounts of water. “To his mate p>
I paused at that. Let the words sit between us for a moment before I answered. “Even after getting your memories back p>
1/3
Ivory’s jaw tightened. She didn’t look at me, kept her gaze fixed on some middle distance, the particular unfocused stare of someone whose mind was very far from the room they were physically occupying. “Especially because p>
“Walk me through that,” I said. Not pushing. Inviting, which was different.
She was quiet long enough that I thought she might not answer. Then: “In as much as I hate Aria. And I do, Nina. I want to be honest about that. I hate her in a way that’s physical, that takes up space in my chest and makes it hard to breathe around. I hate that she exists in the space that should have been mine. I hate that she’s wearing a title she didn’t earn and carrying a bond she didn’t build toward. I hate that she is there and I am here p>
“Okay,” I said carefully.
“But she saved his life.” Ivory pressed her lips together. “During the Curse, I knew every risk Kael faced. Knew every time he came close to losing himself entirely. Knew exactly how fine the line was between him surviving it and not.. The curse would have taken him completely. And Aria was there. She chose to stay. She let the bond form, which meant she accepted everything that came with it, which meant she is the reason he is still alive and still himself and still capable of sitting beside my bed for three hours holding my hand p>
Her voice cracked on the last part. She pressed it through anyway.
“I understand it,” she continued. “Logically. Completely. Aria saved Kael. I cannot simultaneously love Kael and wish Aria had let him die. Those two things are not compatible and I am not capable of choosing the second one. So p>
“So you sent him back to her,” I said.
“So I told him to go to his mate.” She finally looked at me, and what was in her eyes made my throat tighten. “Because I understand it logically and emotionally I am still – I am still broken, Nina. I am raw and I am hollowed and there is a part of me that wants to find her and finish what I started in that chamber, and I can’t let that part win. I can’t let my feelings be the thing that makes me into someone I don’t want to be p>
Something in her face shifted. Crumbled. The control she’d been holding dissolved in pieces, the way ice breaks up on a river in spring – first the edges, then the middle, then everything
at once.
She broke down completely.
Not quietly, the way she usually cried when she allowed herself to cry at all, the controlled and private grief that she usually kept carefully contained. This was the full weight of it, ugly and unrestrained, sobs that shook her entire body as she pressed her face into her knees and let three years of loss and months of confused not-knowing collapse into each other.
2/3
I moved from the stool to the bed without thinking about it, wrapping both arms around her and pulling her into me, her face against my shoulder, my hand at the back of her head. She didn’t resist. Just folded into me and cried in a way I hadn’t heard from her since we were children and our parents had died within eighteen months of each other and we’d spent a winter being grief-stricken and furious in the same house.
3/3
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