Slave to Royal: The Omega Moon goddess

Chapter Eight

CHAPTER EIGHT

POV: Nyla

The ravine was cold and smelled like wet earth and old leaves and I had never been anywhere more beautiful in my life simply because it was not that cell, not that dirt floor, not those four walls that had learned the sound of every noise my body made when it was breaking. Tarek set me down against the rock face with more care than I wanted him to use and stepped back, and for the first time since I woke up in his arms in that corridor I could look at him properly, all of him, in the thin grey light coming over the ravine wall.

He looked terrible. Hollow under the eyes, thinner than I remembered him being, like the exile had eaten something out of him that titles and rank and the easy confidence of a man who had never lost anything had been covering up for years. Good, said the part of me that had spent three weeks on a dirt floor. Let it eat. Let it take everything.

But the other part, the part I kept trying to smother, noticed that he was looking at me the same way, and that whatever he saw made his jaw go tight in a way he could not fully control.

He crouched beside me and reached into the fold of his cloak for cloth and something that smelled sharp and medicinal and I understood what he was about to try to do before his hands got anywhere near me.

"Do not touch me."

"Your back needs cleaning or it will go septic before morning."

"I said do not touch me, Tarek."

"And I heard you." He met my eyes without flinching. "Move your hair."

Something white-hot moved through me at the calmness of that, at the complete absence of a question in it, like he had simply decided the argument was over before it started, and I shoved his hand away from me so hard the cloth fell to the ground between us. "Who do you think you are? Who do you think you still are to me that you can sit there and tell me to move my hair like I owe you access to my body after everything you did with it."

"This is not about what I think I am to you. This is about the fact that those wounds are open and you have been on wolfsbane for three weeks and your body cannot heal itself the way it should and if I do not clean them tonight you will wake up with a fever bad enough to slow us down when we cannot afford to be slow." His voice was even. Unbearable. "You can hate me while I do it."

"I hate you right now and you are not doing it so that argument does not work."

He picked the cloth back up off the ground and looked at me and something shifted in his expression, not anger, not impatience, something quieter and heavier that I did not have a clean name for. "I know what I did to you," he said. "I know what I gave you that night. A compound I bought from a dark practitioner who warned me it was not safe for a bloodline he could not identify, and I paid him double to stop asking questions and deliver it anyway because I was terrified of what I felt for you and I wanted to control it. I did not weaken your shift, Nyla. I tore the protection the goddess herself sealed around you before you were born. I stripped every layer that was keeping what you carried from consuming you alive. I did that. And then I stood in front of five hundred wolves and punished you for surviving it." His voice went rough on that last part in a way that sounded nothing like performance. "I read it in the original scrolls. Every line of it. I sat with what I had done for six days before I came back through that gate and I am not telling you any of this so you will forgive me. I am telling you because you deserve to know the truth of what happened to your own body."

I sat with that for a long time, longer than I wanted to, turning it over the way you turn something sharp over in your hands to find every edge of it.

"Understanding why someone destroys you," I said finally, "does not make the rubble any smaller."

"No." He did not argue it. "It does not."

"You do not get credit for telling me the truth now. The time for the truth was before you opened your mouth on that ceremony ground."

"I know that too."

"Stop agreeing with everything I say." My voice cracked on it and I hated that it cracked. "Stop sitting there being reasonable and quiet like I cannot see what you are doing. You think if you just absorb everything I throw at you without defending yourself it will make me feel guilty for being angry. It will not. I earned this anger. I bled for this anger, literally, on a dirt floor, one day at a time, while you were wherever you were feeling bad about it in comfort."

Something moved across his face at that. Not guilt, something rawer. "There was no comfort in it. I want you to know that, not because it matters compared to what you went through, but because I want you to know I am not asking you to feel sorry for me. I am only telling you it was not comfortable."

"Good." I meant it. I held his gaze and meant every syllable of it.

He moved toward me again with the cloth and this time I swung at him, open palm, connecting hard with the side of his face, and he took it without pulling back, without catching my wrist, without doing anything except absorbing it the way he had absorbed everything else, and that somehow made me angrier than if he had grabbed my hand. I hit him again, harder, and he caught my wrist that time but only to steal it, not to restrain, just to stop the momentum, and we stayed like that for a second that lasted too long, his hand around my wrist, my breathing coming harder than the effort warranted.

Then he pulled me closer, not rough, just decided, and looked at my face from close enough that I could see every piece of what he was feeling and it was not nothing, it was the opposite of nothing, and his eyes dropped to my mouth for just a second before he seemed to realize what he was doing and something shuttered back down behind his face, and he let go of my wrist and stood up and walked to the other side of the ravine and sat down with his back against the rock and his eyes on the treeline above us.

He did not speak again.

I sat there with my wrist still warm from his hand and my heart doing something loud and unreasonable in my chest that I refused to acknowledge, refused to examine, refused to give any room at all, because the man across this ravine had called for my death in front of everyone I had ever known and my body had not gotten that message yet and that was a problem I intended to deal with.

I lay down against the rock wall and closed my eyes and told myself to sleep, that I was practical and I needed rest and none of what just happened in my chest meant anything at all.

I was asleep in minutes. My body did not ask my permission.

When I woke, hours later, the grey light was beginning to lift and he was still there, exactly where he had put himself, back straight, eyes on the dark line of the trees, like he had not moved once in all the hours between. Like he had sat there all night and watched over something he had already destroyed and decided to protect anyway.

My chest did the loud, unreasonable thing again.

I closed my eyes before he could turn around and see it on my face.