Page 75 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

I bring my eyes back to him. “I’m going to carry it out in the open. I told my own pack two nights ago. Now I’m going to tell everybody else who has a right to it. I’m going to stop deciding what people get to know about their own lives.”

Faelan says nothing.

“And I’m not going to use it,” I tell him. “Not on a court, or a throne, or on the Accord. It isn’t a lever. It’s the truth, people are owed it, being owed something is not the same as having it used on you.”

Saying it out loud does what days of turning it over never have. It stops being something I’m considering. I’ve said it in front of witnesses now, that means I have to do it. There’s still the part I have no answer for. The people the founders shut into the world they closed. Whether they ever learn a word of any of it. Whether that door was ever meant to open again. Nothing I just said reaches that. I don’t have anything for it tonight.

Faelan’s face changes. I’ve watched that man take a strike, a refusal, seen his own certainty come apart in front of him, and none of it moved anything in him. This moves him. There’s real loss now, the kind that goes all the way down.

His whole purpose runs on there being two roads. Every year he has spent on this was built on one certainty, that anybody who saw the crime clearly would have to pick one or the other, that refusing to burn it meant choosing to bury it, and that put them with the Council.

I’ve just stood in front of him and been neither, he has nothing ready for that. The chamber tears open behind him. Valen shuts it before it runs. Faelan turns back into the fight, his hands coming up. The offer is over. I turn back into it with him. My wings are still out, the flame still lit up both arms. I’ve spent my life letting rooms see about a third of me.

I’m showing everything now.

Chapter 45

Nyxiana

Neither of us is winning.

He’s using himself up, so are we. He’s got centuries behind him. We’ve got whatever’s left in us right now. We’re holding him, matching him. Two people fighting hard next to each other, each of us watching our own side and the other one’s when needed. That isn’t the same as winning. Either one of us could be dead in the next four seconds. So I go to him.

There’s a construct between us. I take it down on the way past without slowing. I don’t have anything ready to say. I’ve never walked up to a person without knowing how the whole conversation was going to run. I go anyway. Valen is closing a fresh tear when I reach him, one hand out, the light bleeding back into the seam and stopping. Neither of us stops fighting to make room for this. There’s no room to be made. He’s still furious with me. I can see it on him between one strike and the next.

The gash that opened him from the collarbone out is knitting itself shut. It was down to the muscle when it happened, now it’s a red line closing while I watch. He’s closing himself the same way he closes the tears. I’ve always known what he is, tonight is the first time I’ve ever seen it work. There’s dried blood at his temple, more of it in his hair where it’s stuck to his forehead with sweat. His eyes come to me, gray, giving me nothing.

“Valen.”

He turns his head. I open my mouth and catch myself working out how much of it to give him. Not this time. A construct comes at the two of us from the left. We take it together without a word. His hand goes out, my flame goes through the opening he makes and the thing comes apart between us before it lands. The second it’s down, I start again.

“I knew what you were the first day I saw you.”

“I’m aware.”

“I’m not telling you as news. I’m telling you because you’ve only ever heard it from me once, I said it badly, and I’ve never given you the rest.”

Another tear rips open behind us. He seals it without taking his eyes off my face. “And you picked now.”

“We might both be dead in a minute.”

Something crosses his face that isn’t anger. It’s gone before I can put a name on it. “Say it, then.”

He wants it straight and he wants it now. “I’d do it again.”

I don’t soften it and I don’t look away from him while I say it. “You weren’t ready. If I’d told you that first week it would have taken the only thing you had, which was believing you were a wolf who couldn’t shift. You’d have had nothing left to stand on.”

He doesn’t move. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you I was wrong, because I don’t think I was. And I’m not asking you to tell me I was right.”

That’s all of it. I have nothing else to give him and nowhere to go if he turns away. Nothing in my life has ever taken what that did. His fury doesn’t move. His eyes give me nothing, just as they haven’t every day since the first night he came out of those trees. The silence after I stop talking runs long. Faelan opens a tear behind us that runs half the length of the chamber. Valen closes it and comes back to me. The silence is still running. Through all of it I’m sure I’ve just lost him, still I don’t take any of it back.

I could make it easier, tell him I was afraid, or how many times I nearly told him. Both are true, both of them would soften what I just said. I don’t say either. Then he reaches for me. He does it first. In the middle of all this, with his other hand still up against whatever Faelan sends next, he puts his hand out and takes mine. I don’t think it changes anything tonight, or this week, or possibly at all about his fury. His hand is warm, there’s blood on it that isn’t his. It closes around mine anyway.

“It was a betrayal,” he says looking straight at me.

“You made a decision about my life without me. For months you knew and I didn’t. I don’t know what to do with that yet.”

“I know.”