She’d done a lot of things for herself while she’d been all alone.
“I don’t know how long.” She came over and sat across from him. “I guess until I stop wondering where you really go when you leave here.”
“It’s just the Audience House.”
“Until it isn’t, though, right?” She took a sip from her tumbler. “Until something else comes up, anotheremergency, another aristocrat who’s trying to kill you, another fight that you refuse to let the Brotherhood handle without you.”
Her tone was resigned rather than angry, and somehow that was worse. It meant this shit was chronic.
“We’ve been through this,leelan—”
“No, I caught you in a lie.” Her voice remained level. “I confronted you. You apologized. But that’s not enough, so we’ve not ‘been through’ anything. We’re still in it. You went into the field after telling me you were just going to the Audience House, and the only reason I found out what you really did is because I went looking for you. And please, let’s not go around in the same circles again. Youneverwould have told me otherwise. Don’t even try to sell that.”
“I wouldtotallyhave talked to you about it.”
“Really? Why put us in this situation then.” As a hitch tripped her voice, she coughed things clear. “You knew I’d lose my shit. That’s why you didn’t go into it with me. You’d made up your mind what you were doing, and you weren’t going to change course, no matter what I said.”
Wrath trained his useless fucking eyes across the table. “I already explained everything. I had to walk through Whestmorel’s place because no one had any clue where he’d gone and I—”
“He was trying tokillyou.” Her chair made a scraping noise, as if she’d shoved her seat away from the table. “Do you really think reminding me of everything that was going on that night is going to help things?”
“It’s a non-issue. He’s dead.”
“He wasn’t when you went to his house. He was just missing then, and he was working with agroupof aristocrats. What about the Whac-A-mole assholes who were standing with him?”
“I was with the Brotherhood! I was well-defended—”
“Don’t youdareget pissed off with me.” He had a vision of her putting both palms forward. “The last time you headed out into the night because youneededto, I went to hell and lived there for three decades. So spare me the attitude when you repeated the same thing the minute you came back from the fucking dead, okay.”
Wrath shook his pounding head. “I lost those thirty years, too. Sometimes, I think you forget that.”
“Oh, no, I remembereverything. Trust me.”
There was a long pause. And as the silence continued, he couldn’t believe that after fate had taken so much time from the both of them, their sweet reunion had had the shelf life of a raw egg.
“I never cared about the birthdays,” she muttered. “It was the anniversaries...”
Wrath frowned. “I’m sorry?”
Beth cleared her throat again. “I stopped celebrating my birthdays, so, you know, the fact that you weren’t there didn’t matter as much. But the anniversaries… God, I’d dread them as they came at me like a truck, and it would take weeks to get over it. I’d miss you so much, my chest would hurt and I couldn’t breathe right. And honestly, that’s what has been on my mind the most since last Wednesday. I can’t do that again, Wrath. I just…I can’t go back there.”
“You aren’t going to—”
“Oh, you can’t promise me that. Even if you don’t go where you shouldn’t. But if you keep heading out into the field? You’re absolutely going to make a liar out of yourself.”
“Look,” he said roughly, “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. I’ve also been apologizing for a week—”
“No, you’re going to skate on me again.” When he went to protest, she cut him off. “Let’s be real. I have to…be real about what you do, who you are. And the problem with that is the more I stare reality in the face, the more I remember all of the anniversaries I spent alone. My widow years all but broke me, Wrath. I’m not the female you left. I’m what those decades have turned me into, and no apology from you about what you did last week, no matter how earnest in the moment now, can erase those scars.”
As her pain wafted between them, an acrid smell that was like chemicals burning, he got bedrock angry. At himself. At his fucking throne. At Lash and the Lessening Society, and the aristocrats in theglymera.
At Caldwell, NY, and all of its bullshit.
“I love you,” he said with exhaustion. “And I really am sorry.”
There was another stretch of quiet, one so long, he wondered if she hadn’t somehow snuck out and left him.
“I know you are.” Her voice sounded equally tired. “I’m sorry, too.”
