She is softer, kinder, than he deserves and it is like swallowing thorns. He can feel the way his throat wants to tear on it and he wishes that he could be something different. If he was, perhaps this entire interaction would go differently. Perhaps he wouldn’t have snapped at her. Perhaps he would have just shown his concern instead of letting it transform into fury and then wonder at the aftermath of his rage.
Maybe his entire life would be different by now.
But it’s not and he knows he has no one but himself to blame.
“Lilian,” he says her name quietly and does his best to take the edge out of his voice, remove the gravel that so naturally turns the corners of it dark. It was a beautiful name, he thinks, and he has never been very good at handling beautiful things. All you had to do was look at the way he had crushed the women in his life between his palms. All you had to do was look at the twisted thing he had turned with Kensa.
But she is innocent, and he hates himself for ruining it.
He hates himself for not being what she deserves in this moment.
“Do you not have a home?” he asks and this question burns because even though he lives in Sylva, he does not feel like he has a home—not really. His home had been Tephra until it wasn’t. It had been his home until he had left to find a healer for his father’s wolf and traded himself for it instead. It had been his home until he sat on the sidelines while his new home waged war against it and he did nothing.
Now he knows the worst of himself.
And he knows that he doesn’t deserve a true home—but maybe she does.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake