Page 244 of Onyx Cage: Volume II
Our time reacquainting ourselves with one another was interspersed with meals delivered to our room, well-needed rest, and Rowan’s occasional insistence on doting on Boris.
I watched her coo over him yet again, feeding the overweight ball of ginger fluff another piece of bacon, wondering how it was that she so easily went from this to seductress to warrior princess.
It took most of the day for me to feel like I could breathe again, to ease back into the comfort of who we had been. And for me to broach the subject that risked rubbing salt in the wounds we hadn’t quite healed.
I couldn’t quell the burning need I had to fill in the missing pieces of her, though, to understand what had happened while she was away.
“At the risk of bringing this up…” I began, and her jade eyes lazily slid over to meet mine. “How did you get away from Korhonan?”
I didn’t want to make a habit of discussing other men with my lemmikki while she was naked in our bed, but I sure as storms wasn’t going to ask her to put clothes on.
She lifted one casual shoulder, her mass of curls moving with the gesture.
“I...drugged him. And his guard. After tricking them into playing a card game with me and lacing my flask.”
I blinked, processing that information for all of two seconds before throwing my head back to genuinely laugh. The corners of her lips tilted upward at the sound, and I shook my head.
The poor bastard. If I had been harboring any real hostility for him, I was certain that might just be sufficient revenge. Korhonan might not have understood how ruthless she was before, but he certainly did now.
“Storms, Lemmikki. You are savage when you want to be.”
She shrugged again. “A fact you would do well to keep in mind.”
And I would. But then, I had always known about the cut-throat, bawdy tavern-song-loving side of her. What I wanted to know about now was the side I had missed while she was rallying an army to her side.
So I asked her about that, too.
A bittersweet grin tilted her mouth as she recounted her first meeting with Andrei. How she had sought them out intentionally, traveling from one camp to another to gather more soldiers. How she had gone into villages asking the blacksmith’s secret apprentices to help her forge weapons for the battle.
And about how theBesklanovvyhad fallen to their knees when she offered them a future—a second chance at a life they had barely gotten a chance to live.
I shook my head, my brow furrowing as I considered it all. Storms help the next lord who questioned her right to be in the council room. Not one of them could have done what she did or would have thought to try.
“You are truly remarkable, Lemmikki,” I told her. “What you did that day, for Bear?—”
She silenced me by placing a finger to my lips. Her expression hardened as she met my eyes.
“Let me be clear about something,” she said in a serious tone. “I love Bear. I love our people.”
It was the first time she had referred to them that way, asours, and I wondered if it was a reaction to my absolving her of the obligation of caring for them, or a result of the time she had spent in their midst.
I waited, sensing a caveat.
Sure enough, she went on. “But I don’t know that I could have done what I did for them.”
I furrowed my brow, but she shook her head, signaling me not to interrupt.
She searched the room for several heartbeats before fixing her gaze solidly on mine once more. “I did that foryou, Evander.”
I stilled, my focus frozen on her, the delicate curl that she was twisting around her finger so at odds with the fearsome warrior before me. The woman who just told me that she had raised an army, not for the greater good or to thwart Iiro, but only for me.
How had I ever found her?
How had I almost let her go?
“All this time, I was worried about having the kind of love you go to war for,” she admitted. It made sense, considering thehistory between our kingdoms. “I thought it made you weak and selfish and reckless. And I don’t know, maybe those last two things are true.”
They definitely are, Lemmikki.