Chapter 29

Tristan

I stared bleary-eyed at the trunk of the tree, absently letting my power flow without providing it much direction. “Please, just hold it up,” I mumbled. “I don’t care how you go about it, just don’t drop any rocks.” It was the wrong way to manage the magic – the structure was architecturally complex, and with the amount of activity in the earth as of late, it required my full attention. Which was rather difficult, given that Cécile was the center of my every thought. Every day, every hour, every minute. Every bloody waking breath, which was a substantial number of breaths, considering I’d rarely had more than a few consecutive hours of sleep in the time since she’d arrived.

Which had clearly caused me to lose my mind. What other explanation could there be for my hoping she would stay? We’d kidnapped her from her family and forced her to marry someone she didn’t even know. Something that wasn’t even human. I’d treated her dreadfully for nearly our entire marriage. And still she’d saved my life. Told me that she loved me.

But what did that even mean?

Cécile could lie. I’d watched her do it countless times. The tiny little mistruths she employed without any real intention of being deceitful. It wasn’t in her nature to be manipulative or devious; but it was in mine. How many secrets was I keeping from her? Layers and layers, I thought. Many were those of my people, but some were mine alone. She knew it, too. Knew that I kept her in the dark, and still she trusted me implicitly. I could see it in her eyes: a blind, unfaltering faith that I would never hurt her, despite my having done exactly that on so many occasions. She lived in the present, always running off in the heat of the moment and saying exactly what she thought, rarely considering how the things she said or the decisions she made would affect the future. I was the exact opposite. Almost every action I took or decision I made was designed to affect circumstances months, years, even decades down the road. I’d always thought it was the prudent way to live, but now I feared I would wake up one day an old man, with my past wasted and no future left to live. Loving her had changed me, pulled me into the present and made me want to give myself to her as wholly and completely as I could.

But I was who I was, and I could not let go completely. Could not trust her the way my heart wanted to, because I could see the way it would go. I would give her everything I had, love her with every breath of my being. I would have months, perhaps even a year of happiness before my other plans came to fruition. Then I would be bound by my own promise to let her go, and she would leave. Closing my eyes, I watched a specter of her future self walking down River Road and out onto the beach, never looking back. The pain was worse than a spike of iron through the heart.