Page 102 of The Fate of Black Hearts

“What now?” Her body deflated. “Are you going to fuck six years apart out of your system? Then you’ll toss me back to my own fate as if my life has nothing to do with you?”

He opened his mouth to reply but stopped. Evie wasn’t done.

She paced in front of him. “That’s what you do. You show up, maybe ‘rescue’ me from something awful or maybe just give me a mind-blowing night. Then you disappear. Sometimes you’re gone for a week. There was one time it was two years.” She held up two fingers. “That was utter hell. I can’t live through that again. I survived with uncertainty about you for what felt like forever. You refused to commit or even lend me more than a piece of yourself. Now you think you can waltz back into my life. Why? Because you’re tired of me not remembering you when it wasyouwho took away my memories?”

His reply burned his throat, but she wasn’t ready to hear him yet.

“I gave you everything of me every time I saw you for a long time. I handed you my heart. I trusted you. In return, you erased me. Poof.” She clapped her hands for effect. “Because it was the easiest solution.”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

“Seemed like it was.”

“It was the only choice.”

“A choice implies there’s more than one path. When are you going to believe I can protect myself? When are you going to trust me?”

“I do trust you.”

“Not enough.”

“I had issues with the Conclave. They threatened you back then, but they’re not going to come after us anymore. I do have things to sort out with some of them, though.”

“Yet another problem that you’ll no doubt use as an excuse to disappear for months, maybe years.” She strode away from him. Then stalked back and put a hand on his chest. “What happened to make you not know how to trust your heart?”

He dropped his chin and blew out a long breath. “I was in love long, long ago. Well, I thought it was love, but I was wrong.”

“You were?” She drew back as if he’d slapped her. “You said there’s no such thing as love.”

“I loved her with everything I could, but it turned out I was young and naïve. I was barely twenty. She wove my emotions tight to her through skillful seduction. Sex became an addiction. What I perceived as special was nothing but a careful plan to get to my father. He was the most powerful man in that time. He may have married my Romani mother, from whom I got these powers, but he slept with many women. That’s how I ended up with a half-brother by a different Romani mother. My mother fell ill around the time I thought to seek marriage with this woman. I hadn’t realized she had been sleeping with my father almost as long as me. I overheard them speaking one night, talking about killing people. I let it slide then. Death was a commonplace discussion at a warlord’s table. They were speaking of my mother and me. We were the two people in her way. She convinced my father we were in the way of them finding happinesstogether.”

Evie took his hand in hers and knelt in front of him.

He continued. “Days later, I came home earlier than anticipated from my patrol as a border guard. I was ill from bad water. I found my mother swinging from the rafters as if she had taken her own life, which I knew was a lie. Her religion prohibited suicide. She was also too sick to hang herself without help. Someone skewered me with a sword from behind. The idle mage power from within me woke up. It blasted free and protected me. In that explosion, I killed the woman I thought I had loved. The one I had trusted.” The memory of her bleeding from her nose, eyes, and ears with the gaze of death haunted him off and on in dreams for a long time.

“My father had always been an abusive creature, but it got worse until he, too, tried to murder me. He was angry to have lost a gifted bedmate. Yet, he was relieved his sick wife was gone. To him, a good fuck was more valuable than blood relatives or jewels or land. Again, this power within saved me, but it also marked me. I killed two people without lifting a weapon. Villagers wanted to quarter me and burn my parts at the stake for being a witch. That’s when Marik took me to train. He had disappeared years earlier after a similar series of odd events. I was terrible to everyone back then, even after he apprenticed me to a senior mage. Most of the time I was half drunk. I was sadistic as hell, and I was broken. It took decades to find faith and morality, but I did. I found solace in prayer and meditation. I found direction in the directives of the Conclave. Myinability to trust kept me alive. My unwillingness to love kept me alone. Until you.”

“That’s terrible. I get being hurt and not trusting. Yet, you’re still so skeptical.”Maybe I am too.

Her loud thought echoed in his brain.

“Both of us do trust each other.” He stood to face her, but rising to stand left him out of breath. He caught her when she paced by him to pull her into him. “We’re going to get you out of the decline.”

“Everyone dies. So what if my time is coming a bit faster? This isn’t something you can show up and fix with one foot in the picture and one out.”

“I never left.”

She continued as if she didn’t hear him. “You can’t guest star to play the hero. One night of tremendous sex isn’t going to cure this.” She gave him a hot once over and muttered, “I’m tempted. It’s been a hell of a long time.” With a headshake she continued, “One bout of magical healing won’t work either.”

“We don’t know that.”

She laughed sadly. “I want you so much my hands are shaking.” She showed her tremoring fingers. “Being this close to you is awful, but this is only attraction. It’s not what’s real. The only thing that might work to stop the decline is if I bond with you. It has to be an all-in commitment, from now until forever, from both of us. After what you just told me, I don’t think we can do that.”

“We already have.”

“What we have…I don’t know what this is.”

He lifted her hair to kiss her ear. “We have trust.”