Page 155 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
“You almost lost your life. I’m not worth that.”
“You don’t get to decide what you’re worth to me.”
“You’re worth too much to me to die.”
Silence fell, brimming with the strain of things oft thought, heartfelt, never uttered. The fog pooled around them like a silver sea. Light from an Elsewhere shimmered through it.
“I never want to see you like that again,” said Aurienne. More softly she added, “That’s why I gave back the ring. So ties would be cut. So you wouldn’t have—a reason, ever again. We’re on the verge of war—of years of wars.” Her voice became an emotion-pressed whisper. “Please promise me I’ll never see you like that again.”
“I can promise, but you know exactly what our promises are worth.” Mordaunt reached for her hands. He wasn’t wearing his gloves. Histhumbs passed over her knuckles. “I saw your bones. I should never be able to say that sentence.”
The pond had taken the hagstone. Aurienne no longer bore its weight. There was only the lightness of Mordaunt’s touch.
His breath punctuated the fog with a paler shade. “I’d do it again,” he said. “And again and again.”
Was it madness or was it a confession?
Were they the same thing?
The air between them grew rarefied, fragile. Precarious joy and fear warred in Aurienne. He hadn’t pushed away her hands again—he had reached for them himself. Had she not extinguished any feeling he might have for her? Was his deofol right? Could he still…?
“I came here tonight to cast away the hagstone,” said Aurienne. “I wanted to come to a place of healing to do it.”
Osric’s eyes went to her bare clavicle, then caught her eyes again.
“I pulled out the slow-turning knife,” said Aurienne.
She found that her hands were shaking. She had just taken back her exiled heart. This was reckless. This was self-destructive. This was a leap of faith.
She was going to tell him that she loved him.
Hurt might follow. She deserved it if it did. She would risk heartbreak in this moment of new-healed fragility. She would find a bit of her own wildflower bravery.
“All this time, I thought I was healing you, but you were also healing me.”
He bent his head towards her. Their foreheads touched.
“We can’t be,” he breathed. “Tell me we can’t be, one last time. Gods, give me peace.”
“I won’t,” said Aurienne. “I can’t.” She clutched his hands in her shaking ones. “For so long my hands have been defined by my abilities, my tacn, my Cost. But they’ve been empty—so empty. Hands should have other hands to hold. I want them to be yours.”
In his gaze, wretched pain, wretched hope. “But it’s impossible.”
“So was healing you,” said Aurienne. Her voice caught. “So was—me falling in love again.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending, or hardly daring to comprehend. Their breaths crossed how souls touch.
She slipped her trembling hands on either side of his face. He was a blur through her tears.
The words—the impossible words, the words she had thought she would never say again—tumbled out of her.
“I love you.”
She spoke them against his mouth, and against reason and logic and pragmatism, and in defiance of the divisions of Order and of absolutes and of her own fear.
“I love you, and if it’s not too late, if I haven’t destroyed what might have been, if we can have any sort of life together—whatever it looks like, I want it. I want to be with you.”
When he did not answer immediately, the quiet left her in agony; there was only the sound of sea fret and her heart-blood, drip-dripping away in the silence. She could not bear to look at him; she could hardly stand.
