“No,” I barked, instantly regretting it when she stilled.

Sickened, at myself and by how much I needed to both take and escape her, I turned for the kitchen and didn’t sense it—didn’t expect it after grouching at her like I had—so I flinched when her fingers brushed my own. “What happened to you?”

I pulled away, moving far enough that I could begin to warp someplace else.

“Scythe…”

“You,” I said quietly, too quietly, and froze before the dining table. “You happened. Years of fighting back shadows, and there you were. An unexpected light. Then you ripped it from me without warning, without even fucking waiting. You took it all without a care for anyone besides your fucking husband. Now you’re here, and I…”

“What?” she carefully prodded, slowly advancing behind me.

“I don’t trust it.” I swallowed, the sound thick. “I don’t trust you.”

Then I disappeared.

TWENTY

Aster

More than just Scythe’s thick hair had gone.

Anything that had once remotely softened him was gone.

Now there was nothing but cold, studious venom within his gaze. An aggressive obsession to claim within his touch.

I’d have taken him any way he came if only he would let me.

He refused. I’d begun to fear that perhaps I repulsed him and that he’d regretted cementing the mating bond between us. I’d have never guessed that maybe, just maybe, I’d broken his heart.

It would seem I’d once again been painfully naïve, yet I also couldn’t fault myself for thinking he hadn’t cared. He was my mate. He was compelled to care even if he did not wish to. But I hadn’t thought his feelings ran any deeper than that of his beastly instincts and his ego.

In all the months of misery I’d endured in Wistensia, I hadn’t once thought that I wasn’t alone. That he would be hurting with me. Maybe more than me.

He barely knew me. Yet he knew me in ways I’d not shown another soul in many years. I wouldn’t delude myself into thinking he loved me, but I also couldn’t forget that there were feelings, a smattering of stepping stones, that most encountered before falling into something as powerful as love.

For I felt them, too. All of them. That perilous climb that would lead to a freefall—into a madness none of us wanted to fall into on our own.

Strange and more than a little off-putting, this confusion and anxiety and desperate longing. As I’d felt none of it in this way before.

I’d been in love before. I could never cheat myself or Rorn of what we’d once had by making it seem smaller now that I’d fallen out of that love.

But that love had been instant. A certainty upon the first meeting of our eyes.

And perhaps, too easy.