Page 77 of A Soul to Embrace

For the longest time, Jabez had been furious with her.

He couldn’t believe someone had dared to manipulate their own mind so deeply. To convince themselves he was a villain when he’d never done anything wrong to begin with.

She came with him willingly when he offered, and he’d tried his best to be patient and woo her properly, only for her to think so poorly of him. Not once had she revealed that she’d felt thatway, skilfully hiding it behind false pleasantries and alluring smiles.

Her beauty made it hard to see the truth in her.

And yet, once he realised how she perceived him simply because he was a Demon, he’d still never been cruel to her. He didn’t relinquish his vow of protecting her or revoke his help with her own personal vendetta. She remained pampered like a damn princess, just one he kept at arm’s length because he could no longer trust her.

While, at the same time, he became a source of healing for her. She spoke to him often, and Jabez had just listened quietly, as advice was never what she sought. She’d get angry at him if he attempted to offer any insight.

She just wanted someone to scream her frustrations at, and he’d willingly taken on that role for her. She had her reasons for everything, and none of this removed the pain she’d gone through. Pain he’d witnessed in her, which sometimes reflected what he felt inside.

Katerina had been hurting for a long time, and he’d felt it wasn’t his place to bear any grudges towards her – especially when very little of it had anything to do with him. People who were hurt didn’t think clearly. What he’d done in the centuries he’d been alive in comparison to her mere twenty-seven years overshadowed anything she could have done to anyone.

Jabez was a hypocrite in many ways, but not in this instance. He’d done many vile and unforgiveable things.

He shook his head in exasperation, his shoulders loosening as he broke the tension when it was obvious Fayren wouldn’t. He also didn’t want her to think the worst of Katerina.

“It took me a while to forgive her,” he admitted. “But I understood that she was just doing everything she could to protect herself, even if it was wrong. She valued her life more than her body, so long as no one wounded her. I admired herstrength in that matter. Her resilience. It’s what first drew me to her. Katerina had always been strong.”

Jabez lifted his gaze to the sky when he noticed light brightening it into a muted purple. How long had he been sitting here for dawn to be approaching already?

How quickly time passes in this wretched realm.

“One thing she didn’t seem to understand was the truth made me aware of her thoughts, her behaviour. It’s why I rarely sided with her when it came to the accusations she had regarding Merikh. Most of it was lies, but I also knew it was justherversion of the truth she’d twisted so tightly in her mind that she truly believed it.”

Merikh was a whole other battle he’d needed to face with her, and it hadn’t helped that he’d been there when Jabez first took Katerina from Orpheus.

“I remember,” Fayren stated, rolling her shoulders back. “You could hear them screaming at each other from across the castle. And Merikh had a mean roar to him.”

He let his head fall back and groaned loudly.By the cursed light, that had been such a hard few years.

Merikh was fucking huge in comparison to Katerina. And he fucking despised her, just as she hated him simply because he was a Mavka. Her prejudices against his kind meant anything he did, even if it was merely to shove her out of the way, had her judging him. If he accidentally touched her breast or her arse because his hand was so big it could hold her entire head like it was a ball, she thought he was assaulting her.

The fact that he got so sick of her drama he left for a few months revealed he didn’t want her – he wantedawayfrom her.

“My own friend left because of my woman, and I was in the fucking middle of it. Both were angry at me for not intervening, for not shoving the other out of my home. I could see each oftheir perspectives, and I tried my best to calm them, to educate them on each other. Neither wanted to listen.”

There had been no winning.

Jabez eventually gave up and told them to sort it out themselves. Merikh wouldn’t hurt her, as he knew it would enrage Jabez, and Katerina had been too weak to harm him in return. They just shared unpleasant words with each other.

Funnily enough, she considered him a stupid brute, yet Merikh had been the one to just avoid her. He turned his anger into mockery in retaliation.

And she’d grown upset with Jabez when he couldn’t help scoffing out a laugh because Merikh’s insults were so random and weirdly funny.

Fuck. I miss my damn friend.

His humour had been as fucked up as Jabez’s. His arrogance was born from Jabez’s. His sarcasm was a mirror of his own. In some ways, Merikh had formed in Jabez’s image simply because he’d been the one to educate him.It’d felt like I’d... grown up with him.

Merikh was immortal and undying, which meant he wouldn’t age and fade away. There had been relief in that.

They’d been companions for almost eighty years, starting a little over two hundred and fifty years ago and ending barely ten years after he met Katerina. They’d been so close, watching each other’s backs, being each other’s most trusted confidant, that it was like Merikh was his... brother. For a while, he’d considered that bull-headed Mavka as his only family.

And that had been taken from him by his own stupidity. By Katerina, who kept whispering in his ear, wearing him down, occasionally making him angry at Merikh. Then she’d used Jabez learning of Merikh’s blood relation to Weldir – a moment in which his heart and mind had grown weak – and he turned on his only family.

I lost a lot of affection for Katerina after that.

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