Slave to Royal: The Omega Moon goddess

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

POV: Nyla

I walked until the light from the clearing was gone behind me and then I kept walking because stopping meant standing still with everything I was carrying and I was not ready to stand still with it yet, not with the gold still moving under my skin and Roan's voice still sitting in my ears and my mother's face doing what it was doing behind my eyes every time I blinked.

My parents.

Celene had my parents.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum and kept moving through the dark between the trees and told myself to think practically, told myself that panic was a luxury I had never once been able to afford, told myself that the most useful thing I could do right now was breathe and think and not fall apart in an unclaimed forest because falling apart solved nothing and I had never once in twenty years allowed myself the indulgence of falling apart when there was still a next step available.

My mother. My father. In Celene's hands.

I stopped walking.

I stood in the dark between two trees with my golden hands pressed flat against the bark and I breathed, one breath and then two and then three, the way my mother taught me when I was small enough that the palace corridors felt enormous and hostile and full of people who looked through me like I was part of the architecture. Just breathe, Nyla. Just stay quiet. Just survive today and worry about tomorrow when it arrives.

She had taught me that. My mother, who knew what I was from the first hours of my life. Who pressed that charm into my palms every single morning for twenty years, both wrists, do not forget, never leave without it, while knowing the whole time that what she was hiding underneath it was the power that could have ended every morning of fear we ever had to live through. She chose the hiding because she loved me more than she trusted the world not to destroy me and I understood that, I understood the calculation, I had made the same calculation in my own head every single day of my life without knowing I was making it, and I still had not decided what to do with the knowledge that she had made it for me before I was old enough to make it for myself.

But right now none of that mattered. Right now the only thing that mattered was that she was in Celene's hands and my father was in Celene's hands and I was standing in an unclaimed forest glowing gold and entirely alone.

Footsteps behind me. Deliberate enough to be heard, which meant he was announcing himself, which meant he had enough self-awareness left to know that surprising me right now would go badly for both of us.

"I told you to stay away from me," I said, without turning around.

"I know." Tarek stopped somewhere a few feet behind me. Not close. Not reaching for anything. Just there, which was somehow the most infuriating version of him that existed. "I am not here to say anything useful. I only want you to know that I am not going back to camp while you are standing alone in the dark with that news."

"That is not your decision to make."

"No," he said. "It is not. But I am making it anyway and you can be angry about it on top of everything else you are angry about tonight and I will accept that without argument."

I turned around and looked at him standing in the dark a few feet away, not crowding me, not performing concern in the particular theatrical way men performed concern when they wanted credit for the performance, just standing there being present in a way I could not dismiss as strategy because I had been watching him long enough now to know the difference between the two and this was not strategy, this was just him, and that was somehow worse than if he had been managing me.

"Would you have come back," I said. The question came out quieter than I intended. "If the kingdom were not dying. If Celene had shifted black and the sickness had never spread and Ironmere was exactly what it was the morning after the ceremony, your cousin on the throne and your title stripped and nothing in the world on fire. Would you come back for me."

He did not answer immediately and I was glad he did not, because an immediate answer would have been the answer he had prepared and I did not want the prepared one. I watched him turn the question over properly, watched him find the version that sounded good and move past it, watched him sit with the true one in silence long enough for it to cost him something, and I knew before he opened his mouth exactly what he was going to say because I had learned his face well enough by now to read the specific way it went still when he was choosing honesty over comfort.

"I do not know," he said.

Two words. Clean and honest and exactly what I expected and somehow still terrible to hear said out loud in the dark.

"The version of me that existed before the borderlands," he said, and his voice was rough on it, not performed roughness but the kind that comes from saying something true that you have been carrying for a long time, "the version of me that stood in that clearing and said what I said in front of five hundred wolves, I do not believe that version comes back for you. I believe he finds a way to move forward and calls it moving on and never lets himself look directly at what it cost you because looking at it directly would require him to become someone he was not ready to be yet." He paused. "The version of me standing here right now would have come sooner. Before the sickness spread. Before the delegations started finding you. Before any of it gave me a reason that looked like something other than wanting you back. I want to believe that is true and I cannot prove it to you and I know that."

"Wanting to believe something and it being true are different things," I said.

"Yes. They are."

I looked at him standing there in the dark, this man who had taken everything from me with twelve words on a ceremony ground, who had dressed his fear in authority and aimed it at me in front of everyone I had ever known, who had then lost everything himself, and walked back through a guarded gate with no title and no leverage and nothing left to offer except the thing he had already broken, and I felt the full weight of what I felt about all of that sitting in my chest like something with no clean edges, not forgiveness and not warmth and not anything I was ready to name or act on, just present, just real, just entirely and completely mine to do whatever I wanted with.

"I am going to get my parents back," I said.

"I know."

"And before you say anything about how, I need you to understand something clearly." I looked at him directly. "This is not something you are going to position yourself in front of. You are not going to make decisions about how it happens or when it happens or what it costs. You are not going to stand between me and Celene because it makes you feel like you are paying something back. If you come with me it is because I asked you to come and you go where I put you and you do not move from that position without my direction. Is that clear."

"Yes."

"I am not asking you to be grateful either. I am not asking you to feel anything about the fact that I am allowing you near this. I am simply telling you the terms."

"I understand the terms."

"Good." I turned back to the dark between the trees and put my hands back against the bark and stared at the place where the forest went too deep to see into. "Then go back to camp. I need five minutes and then I will come back."

"Nyla." His voice was very quiet. "I am sorry about your parents. Not as a strategy. Not as a way into anything. Just that. I am sorry."

I did not say anything for a long moment.

"Five minutes, Tarek."

He did not argue. He did not offer anything else I had not asked for. He turned and walked back toward the camp and the firelight and I stood alone in the dark between the trees and I let myself feel it, my mother's hands on my wrists every morning, my father's voice saying her name, twenty years of mornings and twenty years of hiding and the specific sound my father made when the guards held him back on the ceremony ground and he could not get to me, all of it, every piece of it, for five minutes exactly.

Then I straightened up.

Then I walked back to camp.

We were moving toward Ironmere in the morning whether anyone was ready or not.