Page 96 of Shadows and Flames
We were both weeping, staring with blustering breaths as my brother struggled to heal in the next room. “El…I…I never wanted to hurt you. I would rather?—”
“Donotfinish that sentence. You hurt me by hiding away. You hurt me with what you did in that stupid place!” We remained joined, my queen and me, but I had felt closer to herin my dreams. There was still something she was hiding, and she would nottell me. “Why?” Smoke wafted from my nose, my mouth, but I could no longer control it. I’d once thought distance,wordswere the obstacles between us.
This? I did not even know whatthiswas.
But there was something. I could taste it in the air, could trace it around the trembling of her lips. “Why, Meline?”
The bones in my fingers protested, and I could almost hear them creaking under the strain of how tightly she was holding onto me, now. My focus was on her face, searching for clues, foranswers, but I could sense her power, too. The way it spilled into the air, confused and searching for a threat.
“El…” The trembling of my muscles were joined by the tremors in hers. Until it was an endless loop. “Ican’t.”
“Why?”
Her cheeks were a mess of tears, her words garbled. “Because then you’ll truly hate me.”
The growl I gave came with more smoke. Meline cracked one of the bones in my fingers, like the snapping of a carrot.
We did not drop our hands.
“Tell me,” I begged, demanded, sobbed. “Tell me what would make you think it better for me that you were dead.”
Meline flinched again, as if my laying out exactly what she’d done was a strike to her face. Her cheeks darkened with a flush, and when she sucked in a breath, I did not know what to expect. Another denial? Placation?
Whatever I had in mind, I did not anticipate… a name.
It was unclear, through the watery fog of tears. But as if gazing at a figure through sheets of rain, I—I thought I could decipher what she said. What it meant, though, I had no idea.
My stomach turned in anticipation as she opened her mouth again, parting her lips to identify the valley that stood between us. Since she had been back in my arms,thiswas it.
“His name was Soleil.”
Another of my fingers snapped, but try as I could to focus on the physical pain, the mental was insistent. “You… have someone else?”
Meline’s fang ripped through the surface of her bottom lip as she shook her head. Violently. “No. I,” she gasped for a breath, “I have not been with anyone but you in three years. Since the first time you tasted me in Rhaestras. It has been you.”
Later, I would be able to examine her assertion. Years, and I would be able to access a sense of possessive satisfaction and also disappointment that I’d been unable to say the same.
But just as my Flames grasped for any spark to ignite and guide me through the labyrinth to my queen, the truth I suspected doused them in an instant.
Four heartbreaks.
“Soleil is the name of our son. Our boy.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
MELINE
If I’d feared Elián hating me before, it didn’t come close to the way I now certainly hated myself. The way Elián’s strength, even when he was lamenting what I’d done as we faced down those tricky degenerates, crumpled. His hands went slack between mine, only held up because I kept them.
But, goddess, it felt so devastatingly good to say his name again. Instead of leaving it screamed over the lapping waves of the Ralthan river. Where I scattered the first of his ashes.
“Soleil,” Elián whispered after a long moment, countless breaths.
The sound of our son’s name, curling from his father’s voice. That was more my undoing than admitting the truth. Never, as I’d imagined this moment, had I been able to capture how it would sound from Elián’s mouth. It was music.
And the rest of the story tumbled out of me, like a rock slide. “Tana sensed him first. As we traveled.” I closed my eyes, continued to let the tears fall as I transported back to those days. When I tried my best to process Mathieu’s betrayal and my greatest mistake. “We were in Carthas, then. I worked at a tavern, and Tana sold goods and simple spells at market. Wewere regrouping and licking our wounds, but then there washim.
“I…when my belly grew, there was no room for ignoring it. Even as I still expected the pregnancy to end on its own, we…” a sob hitched my chest. “We went on. He grew, and though my body weakened, though I berated myself every day for telling you to go, I became,” I winced, “hopeful. My search for you, for a Shadow who could lead me to you, was fruitless. I still didn’t trust the guild as a whole, so I kept my name, my state, and my connection to you a secret. Of course, they wouldn’t divulge any information to a nameless female. Wouldn’t carry any messages for me.
