For one brief instant, he looks at her like he used to – sharp and surprised and she expects him to smile, to reach out and touch his lips to her face, press a kiss to her cheek. But it never comes. Instead his eyes grow thin and glassy, a little lost in her face, and she damns herself for allowing that small flicker of hope to catch and burn in her chest. Still, his breath catches and she doesn’t miss that, doesn’t miss the chance to let that sharp smile slip across her lips when she presses her mouth affectionately to his face again. He may be changed and new, a different half of who he was before, but he is still hers, and she will be forever his.
I just want to remember. He says, he breathes, and his voice is as hollow as the old trees in the Chamber had been. Her face is forced smooth and expressionless, flat, but inside she is turmoil, riotous enough to make the storm booming around them ache with jealousy. Had she done this to him? Had she made him feel wrong or less, had she pushed him away with those wary shadows in her emerald eyes. “Killdare.” She breathes, she aches, and she knows she is coming undone. “You don’t need to remember.” Her mouth is against is face again, hungry and aching and desperate, tracing deep hollows and sharp bone and it feels as though perhaps someone has wedged a knife in her chest.
It doesn’t matter what I do, nothing works. He is furious now, his voice a hollow boom, and she smiles. It comes unbidden, coaxed to her mouth by the fire in his veins and the fury in his words. It is like watching the echo of a memory, of a man who had once been all fire and brimstone and tempered heat. “You’re closer than you think.” She says and she slips against him again, silencing the ache beneath her skin that could only be appeased by him, by this man at her side. When she folds against him, soft and sinuous, he responds in kind, pressing his nose to her neck and she makes no attempt to hide the sharp inhalation of pleasure that fills her chest.
But then the moment is shattered by a few treacherous words and she peels apart from him so quickly that he might sway in the sudden absence. I have been eating. She pins her ears, furious and afraid, snaking her head low and wild near his chest. “Why?” The words are so venomous, so thick with fear and fury and none of it is directed at him, nothing but the wild worry that is changing her face into something exquisitely beautiful, perfectly broken. Then, softer, inching closer, seeking the comfort of his chest again, of lips against her neck and in her hair, “Killdare, I don’t understand.” But she is no stranger to the fluctuations of his voice, and it is easy enough to pick out the pain from his whispered confession.
She doesn’t ask right away, is trying desperately to barb her heart against the truth that waits for her on the quiet of his dark, trembling lips. But it is useless and she so caves, soft against him, tracing her mouth across every inch of dark and dull skin until she is brave enough to face an enemy she cannot beat, a danger she has no way to protect him from. “Killdare,” she says, she whispers, she growls desperately into his mahogany skin, “what aren’t you telling me.”
Suddenly, in this moment, he is not a shadow-self, not an echo, not the wrong half of who he was before. He is the champion of her heart, the father of her children, the better half of her very broken soul.
He is everything, and if he looks down at her, if he looks at all, he will know this in an instant.
MALIS
makai x oksana