Page 66 of Seraph's Tears
Sighing, I ran my hand through my hair and looked around. Everything was the same, everything was as it should be, but something gnawed at me. Something was missing.
Eve. Eve was missing.
Shame and regret drenched me. She was probably angry and hurt, perhaps hiding in her room. I needed to make this right.
I was a terrible mate, and we hadn’t fully bonded yet. How would I convince her to give me another chance? I rubbed at the growing pain in my chest. I needed her, and I’d flown away from her in a fit of rage.
Meeting Zorababel Grimshaw made me understand Eve much better. I wanted her to be mine. She was mine. I couldn’t imagine the fortitude she must have to not only escape her cult, but tell her leader and her betrothed that no, she wouldn’t share my secrets with him.
I could trust her. I had trusted her all along, and I should’ve listened to the pounding ayim in my heart this morning. I love her. Like the moon here was strong enough to draw in the tides, so she pulled at my heart just by the virtue of being herself. She needed to know that. What a fool I had been, wasting our time together without baring my heart to her. Without recognizing what pumped through my veins.
I would find her, go to her, get on my knees and beg for forgiveness. Turning once more, I went into the servants’ wing instead.
“Eve?” I called, tightening my wings so they wouldn’t brush the walls on either side of the narrow corridor. “Eve, please answer me. You were right. I should’ve listened to you earlier, understood what you were trying to tell me. Please let me make that right.” I love you.
Silence echoed around me.
I pushed open the cracked door to her room and glanced around. “Eve?”
The small room was so still it felt like it had been empty for weeks. The fire was out in the small fireplace, the boxbed shut. Her trunk sat in the corner of the room, lid open and belongings tangled and twisted inside.
A strange sense of foreboding made my feathers ripple against my back. She wouldn’t…she hadn’t left. Surely. It would be like last time, when she’d gone for a walk. I stalked across the room and rifled through the trunk. It was only half full. I turned to the small vanity dresser and jerked open each drawer, finding them empty.
Hadn’t she had a valise when she arrived? Where was that?
Dread spread like poison through my veins, my heart pumping faster and faster. I scanned the room. It looked neat, tidy, and empty of life. The only thing she’d left behind was that trunk, because it was too heavy for her to carry.
Fear dug its claws in me, pinning my wings and freezing my body. “Eve,” I croaked. “Please, oh stars, please, Eve.” But she wasn’t there to hear me.
I had to find her. With Grimshaw on the moors, she wasn’t safe. He could force her to travel back with him, and I knew that would be the last thing she wanted.
And selfishly, I wanted her back for me. I hadn’t breathed in decades until she arrived, blowing the cobwebs and dust away from both the house and my heart. She was the spring that arrived on my doorstep as winter descended around us, and I couldn’t live without her. I wouldn’t want to.
I spun on my heel, ready to tear into the sky, but something made me pause. I instead hitched my wings as high as I could and ran to the gymnasium. My eyes searched the room—there. I jerked the canvas and leather cords free, then pulled my sword from its scabbard and inspected the metal.
Still strong. I didn’t have time to strap it to my back or my hip. I took the naked blade with me, racing toward the largest window to burst into the sky.
Eve
I twisted in my bonds, gritting my teeth against the pain of the rough fibers rubbing into my raw wrists. “Lilith,” I tried again.
She had returned to the bed with a book of poetry. It had to be contraband, by the way she’d pulled out from the very bottom of her valise, wrapped in her undergarments. There was no way Zorababel allowed her to read something so worldly. “I’m not listening, Eve.”
I sighed. “Obviously you are.”
I heard another page turn.
“Please. You may want to stay, but surely you can understand that tying a woman up and making her travel back to the community is wrong.”
Lilith echoed my sigh. “I’m not an idiot, Eve. You don’t like me, and I don’t like you. Still, I don’t wish you ill. But you know how we have to please the reverend and his elders.”
“We don’t have to,” I began, but Lilith cut me off with a tinkling laugh.
“Oh, it’s all well and good for Eve to skulk at the corners, never drawing attention, getting away with breaking all sorts of rules. But me? Every single man in our church knows me. Watches me. Wants me. I can’t slip. I can’t break a single rule, because they’ll all know immediately.”
“You are favored above all other women!” I snapped.
“That means I have farther to fall,” she retorted.
