Page 241 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

A small weight lifted from my chest, and I went on.

“So, I told myself I would give that to you, even if it meant that you went back to Korhonan. That I would respect whatever decision you made.” Some small part of me had known that it was a possibility when I sent her away, however little I had wanted to admit it.

The smallest smirk tugged at my lemmikki’s lips.

“How did that work out for you?” she challenged.

A grin tugged at my own mouth in response.

It had worked out perfectly well…eventually. I thought back to the day I had gotten the letter, trying to recall exactly what had changed my mind and coming up with nothing but the blinding panic I had felt whenever I pictured her spending her life with someone else.

Once again, I wrapped my arms around her, reminding myself that it was a future that hadn’t come to pass.

“I hardly remember deciding to leave,” I explained. “I got Korhonan’s bird about marrying you...and I didn’t think. I told Taras I was going instead of him, and I threw a trunk together, and I left. I knew that there would be consequences for Bear, and I still left.”

That was the crux of this story, the part that mattered. To understand why I left her, she needed to first understand how far I would have gone to have her, even then.

Let alone to save her.

“Even when we found out what Iiro had done, I couldn’t honestly bring myself to regret it when it meant I had you.” Even now.

A week’s worth of bodies to burn in the courtyard of my home, and I still wouldn’t take back my decision to make her mine, even when it made me every bit the monster she thought I wasn’t.

“So yes.” I traced the line of her arm with my fingers, memorizing the feel of it, just as I had the night I left. “I have always been selfish where you are concerned. You said I should try putting emotion into the things I do, but that’s all I seem to know how to do with you. Logically, I knew that you wouldn’t want to go back to Lochlann. That you would hate me for that.”

Though I hadn’t prepared for this level of anguish. I had expected her anger, not her tears.

“But I felt such blind panic every time I thought about something happening to you, that I convinced myself it would be better for you to be alive and unhappy than dead. I thought you would move on someday, have a life, still be this amazing, fiery light in an otherwise dark world, and I couldn’t handle the idea of that light being snuffed out.”

Those things weren’t necessarily less true now, but I could acknowledge that she didn’t see it the same way.

“And now?” she prodded like she had heard what I hadn’t said.

I let out a slow sigh, tucking a curl behind her ear so I could see her features clearly.

“Now…I still can’t handle it,” I told her plainly. “But I can’t handle seeing you like this, either, and I sure as hell can’t handle losing you.”

From the moment she had stalked across the battlefield and slapped me in the face, I had watched the light in her eyes dim a little more with each of our interactions. Until now.

She looked up at me through her long lashes, eyes sparkling with the first fragment of hope they had held since her return.

“What are you saying?” she breathed.

I’m saying that I will cede this war to you, even if it kills me.

“I’m saying that if what you need from me is to know that I will never again take that choice from you, then...I won’t.” The words nearly stuck in my throat, but I forced them out anyway.

If this was the price I paid to keep her, to never again hear her broken sobs and know that I had been the one to cause them, then I would find a way.

She held my gaze. “Even if my life is in danger? Even if you think there’s no other way out?”

I closed my eyes, trying to shut away the visceral memory of the moment I had gotten Korhonan’s note, the panic and the terror and the unwavering certainty that I wouldn’t be enough to keep her from dying a gruesome death at the hands of our enemy.

We had come through that on the other side, though. Against the odds, against reason, against all practical hope, we were both still here.

Besides, there was no alternative. I had made that choice already.

Still, I couldn’t look at her perfect features while I promised not to stop her from walking toward her own demise.