Page 122 of Alien God

Wylfrael

Torrance didn’t speak on the ride back. She rested her elbow on the side of the sleigh, her chin perched upon her hand, watching the trees go by while I watched her. I thought that I should touch her, but she didn’t seem to want that now. I thought that I should say something, but did not know what.

We arrived at Barra’s enclosure in silence. I detached the sontanna from the sleigh, then helped Torrance down. I would have held her hand the entire walk back to the castle, but she pulled hers from mine as soon as her boots hit the snow.

We said nothing as we walked through the tunnel and climbed stairs together up to our bed chamber. Torrance hung her cloak by the fire instead of handing it to me to do it, and the cool independence in that gesture wounded me more than I wanted to admit. My wings pulsed as I watched her, her back to me, staring into the fire. Finally, her spine straightened, and she turned to face me.

Her face was pale and composed, smoothed of all the agony, all the need, I’d witnessed outside. She seemed a stranger to me now, like I had not just been deep inside her.

“It’s tradition not to spend the night before the wedding in the same room.”

“That’s convenient,” I snapped, irritation prickling. And not just irritation. Fear. Fear that she wouldn’t go through with this after all. That I could take everything away from her, leave no one and nothing else in her path but me, and that still she would not choose me. I was afraid she was lying, that there was no tradition, and that this was the first of many steps she’d take that would lead her away from me.

Don’t marry me, she’d said. She was looking for an out, masking cowardice as care for me, for my future.

“Convenient or not, it’s the truth,” Torrance said placidly. “I can go to another room if you want to sleep here.”

“No!” The word was a roar. It cracked her composure, making her flinch back. I smashed the distance between us with powerful strides, coming to a stop before her. I didn’t touch her with my hands, but my chest brushed hers on my wildly unsteady inhales. She’d mostly fixed her dress but hadn’t tied the laces all the way, revealing lush skin, skin I’d sucked and kissed and worshipped. She’d been so close! She’d given herself to me, and now, and now...

“I don’t believe you,” I hissed.

She turned her chin up, stared at me with those snow and honey eyes that got all the way inside me.

“I’m not a liar,” she said.

“That’s exactly what you are,” I reminded her viciously. “And like it or not, little bride, you’re my liar now.”

Her calm was torn asunder. She looked stricken, like I’d hit her, and I hated myself even while rejoicing in darkness that I’d finally broken back through to her.

“You’re right. I can’t even deny it, because you’re right,” she said quietly. She crossed her arms and turned around, putting her back to me again, staring at the firestone. “You’re supposed to marry someone who makes you better, but I swear that you’re making me worse.”

“And you make me weak!” I snarled. “So, I suppose, in this, we are even.”

Silence stretched between us until I finally could not stand it.

“Do you want me to leave?”

Say no. Call me Wylf again and say you want me.

She did not answer.

I turned around and left.

I thought about leaving the castle entirely but didn’t. I had something to finish before the wedding. It seemed a fool’s errand now. Something born out of ridiculous sentimentality. But I could not seem to abandon the task.

Torrance had told me once, the night we’d struck our bargain, that you did not tell someone to marry you, but that you gave them a ring and asked. The idea of asking her now was stupid. We would marry, it had already been decided. She’d agreed, and there was no going back now, no matter how she tried to pull away.

But the ring...

The ring had been something I could not get out of my head.

There had been nothing suitable in any of the Sionnachan villages I’d visited, so I’d resolved to make my own. I’d already crafted and discarded dozens of the things, none of them quite right. But the wedding was tomorrow, and if I was going to finish this, it had to be now.

I stormed down stairs and through the tunnel until I reached a small workshop in the servants’ area of the Day Tower. There was no one here now. Ashken and Shoshen were likely doing chores or completing last-minute wedding preparations while Aiko cooked the evening meal.

This room had an abundance of tools, none of which I used. I didn’t need to carve the crystal – I’d shape it with my own power. What I would use in this room, though, was the crystal itself. There were heaps of it, large shards and bricks in the corners, that I sorted through as I’d done so many times already, trying to find the perfect piece for her. It was probably futile – every ring I’d already made I’d discarded. If I hadn’t destroyed them all in exasperation, I could have brought them all up to her on a tray and let her choose. Brandished the rings before her as an offering when the other things I offered her no longer seemed enough.

But that would not have satisfied me, either. Because none of those rings had been right.

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