Page 68 of Iridian

But despite everything, I was glad they were here now, that they kept him safe. Keptussafe. We never even heard it if someone came close to the wards of this safe house, or if they tried to get through. The soldiers took care of it. I was blissfully unaware, and Taland no longer even paid it any attention.

He joked and said they were our fairy godmothers, and I was tempted to believe him. He sometimes went out there to check on them, and sometimes I went with, but they never seemed any different—visually speaking—and that seemed to please him.

Yes, Taland was at peace—but only when we were together.

When we weren’t, some…strangethings happened.

He’d gotten electronics, too, when he went shopping while I slept. A laptop and two tablets, no phones but a couple of games, subscriptions to most streaming services, and though 5G sucked up here sometimes, it worked the better part of the day. We ate and watched shows and movies, and we had a lot of sex, too. We went on walks and on hikes, and we spent time at his favorite place as much as we could—a waterfall with crystal clear water that fell into this pool on the other side of the mountain from the safe house. It wasn’t big by any means—maybe about fifty feet wide—and tiny fish lived in there, but it was perfect. The waterfall went on to pour into a bigger pool down the mountain, but we had no desire to go explore it when we had everything we needed barely a ten-minute hike away.

It was there that I noticed something off for the first time.

I was lying on the biggest rock at the edge of the pool with a towel underneath me and a pillow under my head, sunbathing. The sound of the water was perfect in keeping me distracted, notletting me think. It was loud, but loud was good. We didn’t much need to talk, Taland and I, not when we came to swim.

Which was why I found it odd to hear his voice when I was almost sleeping while the afternoon sun kept me warm.

I opened my eyes, blinked the stars away, looked at where that voice was coming from, certain that the sound of the water falling was making me hear things. It wasn’t.

Taland, who had been relaxing in the water, was now on the other side of the pool, sitting on a rock at the edge, talking to himself.Yellingto himself—or rather, at the thin air in front of him.

I stood up, heart in my throat, wondering if maybe there was somebody there that I couldn’t see, that was invisible, because Taland was waving his arms around and those white eyes of his were focused ahead where only the trees began maybe six or seven feet away, and there was nothing else. Not a soldier from his army, not anybody else.

Yet he seemed so fucking frustrated, I could have sworn his fists were shaking when he raised them.

“Taland?” I whispered, so low I couldn’t even hear my own voice through the sound of the waterfall.

So, I tried again, this time screaming out his name as loud as I could.

Taland heard.

He stopped, froze in place for a split second, then turned to me so fast I was tempted to think I’d imagined it. He slid from the rock and into the water—it was hip deep around the edges.

And he…smiledat me.

“Sweetness,” he said, and I read the word on his lips rather than heard it.

I shook my head, looked back to where he had been sitting. “Who were you talking to?” I asked—screaming still because he would not hear me otherwise.

Taland was surprised. His brows shot up and he shook his head, too.

“Over there,” I said, pointing my finger to where he’d been sitting a moment ago as he slowly came closer to me, walking in the water, keeping close to the edge of the pool. “Over there—who were you talking to just now?!”

Taland looked behind, right to where I was pointing, but when he turned to me again, he seemed perfectly confused.

“I wasn’t talking to anybody, sweetness. There’s nobody there.”

The worst part? Hemeantit.

He meant those words and he believed them.

A bad feeling settled in my gut in that moment, and from then on, it only intensified.

From then on, I watched Taland more closely, and I saw a lot more.

Two days later at about ten p.m., we were lying on the couch in the living room, the laptop on the coffee table while we ate cherry-flavored ice cream. Taland had woken me at five a.m. that morning with kisses and touches and a hard cock begging for my attention, and we’d been up a while. We hadn’t gone back to sleep at all, so we were both kind of slow the whole day, which was perfect. We decided to sleep early, too, right after we finished the movie, but then Taland needed to use the bathroom, so I pressed pause and stretched while he was away. I had a smile on my face, a full heart, and areallyfull stomach, too.

Seriously, I had probably gained a couple pounds in the last five days alone.

My smile fell, though, when Taland was gone for longer than usual, and that scene at the pool was still playing in my head every now and again. Even though I’d tried to convince myself that it was nothing, thatIhad been the one seeing things or that Taland had just been messing with me, my gut knew. That’s why I got up and I went to the bathroom to check on him.

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