Page 260 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Isn’t it your entire job to know?”

A familiar slim hand gripped mine, fingers like ice. I tried to squeeze back, but my fingers wouldn’t move.

I’m right here, Lemmikki.

“It’s not anyone’s guess to me. Hewillwake up.”

Yes. I will.

But still, my eyelids remained frozen, my consciousness fleeing with all the warning of a dagger piercing into my skin.

My lemmikki wasn’t talking now.

I felt her at my side, felt her warmth pressed against my body and her energy forever calling to mine.

But she didn’t speak.

Her silence was worse than the yelling had been, bringing hazy memories of a black canopy shutting away a princess who was far too vibrant for the blanket of hush she had cocooned herself in.

She would not go back there. Hadn’t I promised I wouldn’t hurt her again?

I willed my eyes to open so I could look at her, give her some sign that I was coming back to her. It was like rolling boulders up a hill in a snowstorm, but I had not spent a lifetime training to fall short of this.

Not when I could feel her despair washing across my skin.

It took everything I had, but finally, I saw the briefest flash of light, a shadowy outline of crimson curls just before my eyelids snapped shut once more.

But it had been enough. She gasped, fingertips trailing along my forehead, my cheeks.

I was tired from the effort, drained from the monumental task of cracking open my eyelids. Blackness threatened to pull me under once more, until she sucked in a breath to speak.

“It isn’t ridiculous.” Her voice was a low murmur, raspy with disuse, and everything I needed to hold fast to the waking world. “To think that we were connected from the first time we danced. I look back, and I realize you were all I could see. The rest of the room, the world, fell away, and it was only you and your stupidly beautiful, frustrating face.”

I wished that my lips could move so I could smirk at her description.

Stupidly beautiful. Frustrating.

I could say the same, Lemmikki. And you were all I could see, too. All I wanted to see.

Her breath hitched on a sob that resonated in my own chest.

“Then you took me, and even when I wanted to hate you, I couldn’t. Because you saw me. And I saw you, too.”

It was true. For a woman who was rarely observant, she had read every one of the expressions I could hide from the rest of the world. I had hated her for that.

Loved her for that.

“I saw every last, jagged edge of who you were and loved you more for each one.” Her words were quieter now, like they were as much for herself as for me. “Maybe it’s because they resonated with the broken pieces of myself, or maybe we always would have been this way, perfectly fitted for one another.”

You are still not the broken one, Lemmikki. But I liked to think that she was right. That if we had met in another life, an easier life, we would have found our way to each other all the same. She still would have been all I could see.

“You said that you didn’t like who you were turning into when I came along, but you weren’t the only one. I was barely living my life, barely feeling at all, and then there you were.” Thepace of her words sped up, like she was afraid that she would lose me before she could finish her story. “Making me furious. Making me feel things. Making me want to take a chance on something impossible.”

Her gentle fingers brushed against my forehead in a familiar pattern, her curls spilling against the bare skin of my shoulder.

“So I need you to come back to me, because we did it,” she whispered against my skin, breath ghosting along my cheek.

I cursed every part of my battered body for refusing to respond, to show her that I was here. That I hadn’t left her. That I never would.