Page 236 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

I thought about the things I had done because of my father. The only way I had lived with myself was by a careful, logical accounting of the greater number of lives I could still protect.

Then there was my stepmother, who had thrived on seeing another person’s pain.

The only time I had ever catered to my emotions was for my lemmikki, and that was hardly a tale of triumph at the moment.

“Not everyone has had the luxury of living their lives that way, Lemmikki,” I said flatly.

Her eyes flared with the same intense protection I had seen from her before.

“Maybe not before,” she allowed, taking her stance to start another spar. “But it isn’t too late for us to live a different sort of life.”

She launched into a series of attacks before I could respond to her comment.

Which was just as well, because, for a rare change, I had no idea what I would have said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

It took a week to burn the last of the bodies.

While watching the black smoke rise into the sky, it was hard not to feel like the corpses of the men I had trained and ordered into war weren’t the only things turning to ashes in my midst.

Every day, I instructed my lemmikki with the same combination of patience and expectation I held for my men, trying to pretend she was just another soldier, that I wasn’t agonizingly aware of every soft inhale and every flush of exertion, like it didn’t bother me to attack every one of her weak spots while I imagined Iiro doing the same.

All the while, her words marched through my head.

It’s not too late for us to live a different sort of life.

It was another chance at a reconciliation at the only price I was unwilling to pay. She knew that as well as I did, but on this, neither of us was willing to bend.

So we didn’t speak outside of what was necessary. We didn’t acknowledge the awkward silence that fell when we both emerged from our opposite rooms at the same time, or at the inherent wrongness of going our separate ways every night.

Kirill had returned from his brief leave, back to his post outside her door.

“You keep saying that wars take time,” he told me one night. “But neither of you seems to be fighting this one.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant fighting with each other or fighting for each other, but both were true right now.

Not too late for us.

But every time I tried to imagine another way out, I saw her body distorted and defiled, her skin marred by the same words Iiro had carved into the villagers’ flesh. So we continued in our stalemate, locked in a holding pattern of hoping the other would change.

I turned my efforts even more fully toward the actual war. If we could end it, take away the likelihood of another scenario like this one, then all of this would cease to matter.

I had to believe she wouldn’t actually leave once the issue at hand was resolved. We had plenty of differences in opinions, though this one had proven more…contentious than the rest.

In any event, Iiro was silent. So was Korhonan, for that matter. I only knew he was alive because of reports from the single man I had managed to sneak across the border, and I still had no idea how or when Rowan had left him.

We were hardly on the kind of speaking terms for me to ask.

There was plenty of preparation to be done in their absence, though, including corresponding with both Lynx and Crane, now that the birds weren’t being shot down the moment they took off.

Still, to be safe, we sent most of our notes for Arès through Mila, in thinly coded language. Even if they were shot down, a letter from his daughter was unlikely to be scrutinized.

She was, after all, a woman.

When I had gathered the reports I needed to respond to Arès, I went in search of Mila to lend me her handwriting. Taras wasout training the men, but a maid let me know she was in the tearoom.

Of course, so was my wife, but it wasn’t like we could avoid each other under the circumstances.