Chapter 213: Still, he held me

BONNIE

I told him everything.

It did not come out in order. It came out the way water spilled from a cracked jug, beginning in a thin, hesitant stream before widening as the fracture gave way. I started with the dream-walking, with the meadow that had never really been a meadow, and the man who waited there with his hands in his pockets and my chin on his face. I told him about the memory Lycaon had shown me, my mother running through tall grass with her hair coming loose, and how I had finally seen her face.

I told him about the goddess, and the way Selene had spoken through Fia’s mouth, borrowing her breath. I told him that the man who had called himself my father was Lycaon, the demigod, Selene’s son, the first of the Lycans.

For most of it, I kept my eyes on my hands. They looked terribly small in my lap. The green cotton had gathered beneath my fingers, and I kept smoothing it flat, only for it to wrinkle again the moment I let go.

Somewhere in the middle, my voice began to shake. I stopped trying to steady it and let the words come as they pleased, even when they caught in my throat.

I did not look at him. I could not bring myself to.

Nor did I reach for the bond, though I could feel it humming against the inside of my ribs, a held note that seemed to grow louder with every passing moment. I was afraid of what I might find if I let myself look through it. Disgust, perhaps. Fear. Or the cold arithmetic of a man weighing the cost of keeping a mate like me, a woman whose very existence had become tangled up in the affairs of gods and demigods.

Another, quieter part of me knew I was being irrational. Nothing in Lysander’s face or voice since I had begun had given me reason to expect any of those things. He had listened without interruption, without once making me feel that I needed to justify what I was saying.

But fear had never been particularly interested in reason.

If I reached for the bond and found the thing I dreaded, I would have to live with the knowledge that it was real. If I stayed away, it could remain a possibility, something I could circle without ever having to touch. I had spent enough of my life learning how to live with things I could not name. I could manage one more.

"And that is why she left me," I finished. "The goddess. She did not abandon me because I was nothing. She stayed away because I was his. Because anything she did for me might have been seen as a favor to him." I swallowed, my throat sore from everything I had forced through it. "She broke her own law twice just to tell me, and I still don’t know whether to be grateful or furious."

The last word fell between us, and the room seemed to close around it.

The fire popped in the hearth. Somewhere below, a door slammed, followed by the brief burst of someone’s laughter. Ordinary sounds from an ordinary world, carrying on as though I had not just turned my entire life inside out.

Then I looked up.

Lysander had not moved from the arm of the chair. His elbows rested on his knees, his hands clasped loosely between them. His face was very still, and for one terrible heartbeat, I could not read a single thing in it.

My stomach dropped.

I searched his features for something, anything, that might tell me what he was thinking, but he gave nothing away. The silence stretched until I could feel it pressing against my skin. Every second made the things I had confessed seem more monstrous, until I wondered how I had ever expected him to hear them and still see the woman sitting in front of him.

I opened my mouth. I had no idea what I meant to say. An explanation, perhaps, though I had already given him everything I had. An apology, though I could not have said what I was apologizing for.

Before I could manage either, he was moving.

He crossed the space between us in two strides, dropped to his knees in front of me, and pulled me against his chest.

The force of it stole my breath. One moment I was sitting there, braced for the careful distance of a man who no longer knew what to do with me, and the next his arm was locked around my back, drawing me so close that there was no room left between us for any of the things I had been afraid of. His other hand came up to cradle the nape of my neck, his fingers spreading into my hair as he pressed my face against him.

It was not a gentle embrace, not at first. There was something almost desperate in the way he held me, as though he had spent the last several minutes sitting perfectly still because moving would have given away too much, and now that he had finally allowed himself to move, he could not quite remember how to do it carefully.

He buried his face in my hair.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. I could hear his uneven, deep breathing against my ear and feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath my cheek. Then he drew in a long, unsteady breath, the kind a man took after discovering he had been holding himself together by sheer force of will.

I went still in his arms.

I had prepared myself for questions. For disbelief, perhaps, or for the kind of silence that meant a person was already halfway out the door. I had even prepared myself for anger, because anger was something I could answer. I could defend myself against it, explain what I had done and what I had not, give him reasons to stay if reasons were what he needed.

I had not prepared for this.

My fingers curled into the fabric at his back before I could stop them. I wanted to ask him what he was doing, what he thought of everything I had told him, whether he understood what it meant to be tied to someone whose blood carried the attention of a goddess and the legacy of the first Lycan.

Instead, I clung to him.

"Lysander..."