Each day is different, and each night lonelier than the last. When the sun hangs bright like a gold coin in the sky, and the blue stretches on for miles and miles, it is impossibly easy for her to think about something else. Anything else. Straia was good about keeping her busy, filling her free time with stories and laughter and flying through open skies. She kept Oksana preoccupied when the children didn’t, when those metaphorical shadows crept over her skin and darkened those bright emerald eyes until they seemed bottomless. But as the sun dipped lower in the sky and blue gave way to pink and gold, Oksana could feel that tremble return to her bones, a subtle quake that never quite spread to the bright of her chestnut skin. And when night did finally come with quiet and starlight, bleeding sleep into every corner of the quiet kingdom, Oksana fell to silent pieces.

It was more than lost love, more than a broken heart. It was a loneliness whose cold hand had plunged into her chest, whose sharp fingers clutched raggedly at a heart turned to dust. When everything else in her life had been uncertain, there had been Makai. He was as wild as the birds in the sky, and just as hard to hold on to, and she had loved every minute of trying. When Rodrik had placed her on a throne she couldn’t possibly fill, it had been Makai who kept the homesickness at bay. Every single high and low of her life had been had with Makai at her side, and to suddenly lose him, to have no choice in giving him up, it had been her ruin.

Even now she found herself leaving the pine trees behind with hope burning dangerously like a flame in her chest. She did not leave often, it tied her stomach in knots to leave what was left of her family behind, but Pyxis and Ilka never strayed too far from the heart of the kingdom or one another, and Malis had taken Striar of to explore. It seemed Malis was disappearing more and more readily lately.

The narrow path she followed widened suddenly into the vast space of the meadow. For a moment she thought she might just turn back around and follow that path home, but a sense of longing stilled her restless feet and stayed her. With a sigh that shuddered uncomfortably in her chest, she followed the edge of the clearing for a few long minutes, her chestnut and white face a mask of trembling disinterest. Only those close enough to see her eyes would be able to make out the wild hope and uncertainty flickering there like dying stars.

She wasn’t surprised when her search yielded nothing, though she was surprised when disappointment still settled like a rock in her gut. But a dangerous thought landed like a stray dandelion seed in her mind, taking hold and growing until her feet had complied before she had given them permission. Every other time she had come, she had specifically avoided this place, their place, for the dangerous way it made her heart wither in her chest.

And yet-

Oksana paused, uncertain, those eyes as bright as raw emeralds in the dirt as they landed on a shape so devastatingly familiar. “No.” She breathed, a stiff, choked sound. Her expression changed suddenly, darkening, those green eyes flashing dangerously. She wouldn’t go to him, not now, even despite the way every single fiber of her being ached to crash against him as they first had. It didn’t even matter that he would know how she felt, for who could possibly know her heart any better than he.

With each ruinous pound of her aching heart, she unravels. In an instant she is flooded with feelings of lust and longing and fury and regret, and each one strips back a layer of skin until she is nothing more than a bundle of raw nerves trembling in his wake. She hates herself for coming here, for hoping to find her undoing, hated herself the moment their eyes had locked and a wicked fire had burned life back into her veins until her heart nearly burst with it. Yet she also knew she was nothing without him, just a charred shell of memories and could-have-beens. And she knew just as he did that a single, fleeting moment would never sustain the fire roaring in her belly.

So when his hooves hit the ground again and again, and each beat synchronizes with the drumming of her heart, she does not turn away. But the sound that tears from her dark lips is a cry of loss and rage and relief as they come together in a writhing tangle of flesh and sweat. She is primal in her anguish, in this uncertain reunion, and her teeth rake fiercely across the inkiness of his dark, gleaming skin. It is only when their tangled, panting bodies still and come together, chest against chest, heart against heart, that Oksana recognizes the dangerous way she folds into his embrace.

She cries out again, pushing him back, her wings unfurling violently at her sides as each feather narrowed and gleamed, the edges glinting like dangerous obsidian in the high sun. “No.” She tells him through a jaw clenched so tight it’s a wonder her teeth don’t crack. “We aren’t-” She pauses, she hadn’t meant to, and just like that uncertainty rushes back in to pull a frown across her mouth. Aren’t what? Because they were, they were everything, they always would be. Her wings dropped just a fraction, the sharp edges softening back to downy feather as they returned even closer, settling perfectly around the curve of her ribs.

And then he says her name and it is just the same, just as hopeless, as being swept out to sea. She is lost to him, and he to her, and neither one seemed to care. The breath she hadn’t realized she was holding rushed from her lungs as fell back into that familiar embrace, forcing his lips against the soft curve of her gleaming chestnut neck. He whispered her name there, and it his hot breath branded the word into her flesh. Oksana, mine. But the force that pulled her to him so magnetically also repelled her. An indecisiveness that took her heart in its hand and peeled back piece after piece to find the secret it held within.

I love you.

She flinched, stiffening in their embrace, her breath coming out in feverish huffs against his neck. “No,” she says again, welcoming the cool air that rushed in as she pulled away from him, “if you loved any of us, you never would have left.” Any last resolve that had formed like a mask over her desperate chestnut face crumbled and fell away as she looked back at him. Her face darkened, those green eyes flashing as a chill brushed haunted fingers across her skin.

Something had shifted, something important.
She wondered if he felt it too.

She can smell the blood welling in his wounds, the ones she had given him, and her stomach clenches like a fist. Regret is a poisonous thing and she can feel it filtering through her veins from her heart with each thump thump thump. “I don’t want your love.” She spits, and the lie tastes like corroded metal on her tongue. “I don’t need your love.” Nothing could be further from the truth though and the lie unravels her even as she spins it. There is an instinct buried like a blade in her chest, pressing dangerously close against her heart, and it begs her to hurt him, to hate him, to send him away.

But she can’t.
Could never.

“Makai.” She says, singular, solitary. Tired. All at once she looses the knife and rips it from her chest. The fight goes out of her immediately. Her wings close and fold tight against her hunched withers, the feather tips brushing the scars along her ribs. His mouth is still on her neck, his breath hot and familiar and dangerous. She pushes him away again, but there is no venom left, no animosity burning in those gleaming emerald eyes. When she looks at him again, tracing shadows and curves of a face so achingly right, so perfectly familiar, there is a new softness in her expression. Her mouth touches the side of his muzzle, the impossibly soft hollow just beyond the corner of his lip. “I don’t trust you anymore.” Her voice is soft, weary, though she’s careful not to let the confession strike him like a stone.

She pulls away again, settling back on her haunches to watch him from beneath a brow furrowed with concern. “Makai, I love you with everything I am, with everything I have. I’m yours.” She pauses and her face darkens subtly, the softness in her voice sharpening slightly. “But it means I have nothing left when you leave me. I’m hollow.”

I want to love you, but I’m afraid to. Afraid I’ll have nothing left. She doesn’t say.

The cold in the space between them draws her close again and she pushes her chest against his, her mouth on the hard slant of his shoulder. “We have a son,” she says quietly, breathing the confession into the crook of his dark, hard neck, “he looks so much like you.” She presses a kiss against his skin to hide her indecision, glad he can’t see the doubt seeping from the shadows of her face. “His name is Striar.”

He flays her, and she lets him.
She can’t help herself.
No one can.

For a moment, stretched further than the oceans, she withers beneath the blade that is his tongue. It isn’t that she believes him, believes the hatred that spews like black blood from his sick mouth, it’s that he would ever say these things to her at all. There is a numbness that settles like dirty snow over her bright, aching skin. Her eyes fall on his eyes, reflecting the flatness, tracing the tension in his face, the sneer on his mouth. It feels like looking at a stranger, and her heart cries out as it burns up in her chest, settling like ash in the shattered hollows.

“Stupid.” She repeats numbly, clinging to a word that he kept carving away at her with. “Yes.” But there is some fire creeping back into her voice, and those eyes she fights to keep so flat and empty flash like melted emeralds. “I suppose you must think I’m stupid if you expect me to believe that.” But doubt is such a poisonous thing and she can feel her stomach clenching like a fist at the thought of Makai with someone else, of his children with someone else. The hurt and jealously and betrayal that flash through her veins hurt more than any physical pain ever could.

Her eyes settle stonily on the muscles quivering impatiently beneath the satin of his skin. “If you’re going to leave, then leave. But I hope you know better than to expect me to ever come looking for you again, Makai.” Suddenly she is Oksana again. She is tall and bright and mortally proud, and somehow, impossibly, she is keeping the unravelling pieces of her soul stitched tight. And it doesn’t matter that she’s spinning him lies, won’t matter unless he’s knows. Her wings fluff and resettle above her back, the edges of the feathers glinting suspiciously in the fading light.

Love, he says, and the word sits like poison in her belly. “Don’t call me love, Makai, you’re nothing more than a stranger to me.” More lies, they suffocate her. But she plays the part as well as he does, and it doesn’t seem to matter that each knows the others heart intimately enough to see the lies through the sneers. He’d be a fool to believe she wouldn’t always love him. That she would always be looking for him. But she hides that truth with distance in her eyes and disgust twisting her mouth. “I’m glad our children won’t get the chance to know you. They deserve so much better.”

This knife, delivered directly into his heart, this lie so carelessly crafted, hurts her more than anything he had said so far. It takes everything she has left to hide the sway as her knees shudder beneath her. But the effort it takes to stay stoically on her feet with her delicate head drawn proudly back saps believability from the mask she wore like a shield over her face. There will be a second, and maybe he’ll blink and miss it, where the agony in her heart reflects perfectly in the sudden vulnerability of her delicate chestnut face. But she recovers quickly because she must, because if he notices for a second and uses it against her, there will be nothing left to fight for.

And this fight is all they have left.

A moment ago she had stood before him like a tree bowing to a storm. She had felt her bones bending and breaking and caving through her skin, had felt her veins unravel like yarn and fall away into the dirt. Her heart had beat itself ragged months ago, but the tattered remains were little more than a flayed pulp now, thudding wetly within her imploded chest. How could words hurt so much. How could he cleave the flesh from her bones with something as simples as a sneer slashed across his mouth. It was becoming impossible to breathe, she realized abruptly, to force her lungs to expand beneath the press of furious, frightened muscle.

Her soul thrashed in wild death throes.
Something had to give.

So it would.

Like a switch, Oksana dimmed. Her lungs expanded without the clutch of muscle to stop it, her pulse slowed to a steady thump-thump. She felt, in an instant, calm. But even this was a lie – how could it not be, how, when everything else was, too. She watched him distantly, those glittering emerald eyes flat and dull like stone. It wasn’t that she had stopped listening, the words still registered somewhere deep, somewhere that still bled and broke and writhed in agony – it was that she didn’t care. Couldn’t remember how.

It’s better this way. A voice whispered in her mind.

But in an instant she is toeing the line of lucidity again, and she doesn’t bother to hide the flinch that tightens beneath her skin. I love you, Oksana. I love you so much. It is a phrase so devastatingly familiar that the cruelty warping it makes her sick. “It was never a lie for me.” She says in a voice so mechanical, so dull that even she doesn’t recognize it. “And I will spend my eternity loving you, a suitable punishment for being so stupid, don’t you think?” It isn’t really a question, not when she knows he’ll agree, so she disengages again, her face slack in the twilight.

He mentions the Falls, and of course he must, but she doesn’t have anything to say, nothing left to give him. For a moment she had thought to remind him that he had been the reason why. To see if he still remembered his dying days, or the kingdom that had tried to steal him from her, that pivotal moment when she had realized Makai meant more to her than any kingdom ever would. But the memories flash and burn out, turning to ash on her mute lips. They mean nothing now.

I believe we’re done now.

“Yes,” she tells him quietly, those flat green eyes settling pointedly on his face, “I think you are. You should go.”

Not me.
I’ll never be done with you.
And even through the haze of coming undone, of pretending so perfectly (oh, Makai, it’s easier than you think), she has a moment to wonder why he’s still here, why he’s stayed so long.

He’s just bored, dear. Doubt whispers in her ear.