Page 32 of These Immortal Truths
“Yes, Anna.” His gaze lifts, eyes dark with shadows. “I can see where you hurt.”
She stares at him. Thinks of the anger that lit his eyes and the harsh words between them the last time they saw each other. It’s only his tender touch and the softness in which he speaks that gives her hope that the tentative friendship between them is salvageable. Still, in a world where he’s the only constant, she’s unwilling to leave it to chance.
“I’m sorry.”
He stills, brow furrowing. “Sorry?”
Pride sticks, thick in her throat, but she swallows it down. “You were right. There’s a lot I don’t know, and I was wrong to accuse you of cowardice. I—” Anna looks away, cringing. “I just really wanted to save her.”
She’s afraid to look up, to see the judgment on his face, but his voice carries a level of understanding—of empathy—that shakes her. “I understand,” he says, and in those two words Anna hears what’s left unsaid.
I did too.
Somehow, it only adds to the heartbreak of it all.
Anna tips her chin to the blaze across the valley. “They’re burning down the house I was staying in.”
He sits beside her, his forearms resting on his bent knees with a sigh. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it here sooner.”
She looks at him, traces his profile in the moonlight, and wonders how he knew to come at all. How he always seems to know where she is and when to come to her rescue. She could ask, but she’s too tired for riddles. “I threatened a man today.”
His gaze dips to the invisible bruises on her neck. “I suspect he probably deserved worse.”
“I showed him my skin, just to scare him,” she murmurs, looking away and gesturing to the pinprick of fiery light. “It worked.”
“How did it feel?”
Anna thinks of the fear in his face as the man looked up at her, of the feeling of control that helped her forget about the empty feelingin her heart. “Powerful,” she says, a whispered confession. “And painful.”
Khiran sighs, leaning back into the grass with his hands behind his head. She wonders what constellations he’s tracing, if any of them are his. “That sounds about right.” His eyes slide to hers. “Is that what’s bothering you? That you liked it?”
“Why do you think anything is bothering me?”
“There’s an ache in you,” he murmurs, turning back to the heavens. “There has been for years now.”
Anna scoffs, too tired to be angry. “How would you know?” The words,you haven’t been heresit, implied, between them.
“The same way I know someone put their hands around your throat. The same way I know you weren’t afraid when it happened.” His eyes are luminous and, sprawled out across against the grass with a grace she’s never learned, he looks every bit the god he is. “Why weren’t you afraid, Anna?”
She looks away, quickly, before he can catch her uncertainty. “He said he’d kill me. I knew he couldn’t.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I think you know that,” he says softly, before repeating his question. “Why weren’t you afraid?”
How does she explain the constant ache, theemptiness, she carries? She doesn’t have the words for something she can’t even find a name for. Instead, she offers what little she can and prays it’s enough for him to understand how deeply it goes. “I’mtired.”
The answering silence is almost as painful as if he were to answer it. She flushes, filling the silence before he can probe further. “How do you do it?” she asks, the words are little more than a whisper. “So many people are suffering, dying excruciating deaths. How do you live with all their ghosts?”
Khiran idly plays with a piece of grass, twisting and twirling it between his fingers. “One ghost becomes two. Then a dozen. Then hundreds. Eventually the faces blur together and the details of multiple atrocities merge into one looping nightmare.” He looks up at the sky. “And then I’ll discover places of beauty, enjoy food and art that fills me with a desire for more. Nightmares aren’t without end. At some point, you wake up.”
Anna bites her lip, chest heaving around a sob she refuses to release. “I’d like to wake up now.”
His stare is pitying. “I know.”
It’s too much. She is centuries of loss and heartache, of failed rescues and lost causes, rising up like a flood. It’s tearing at her seams, filling her lungs, and ringing in her ears. It’s not until she feels his arms around her, feels her tears wetting the silk of his shirt, that she realizes the keening sob is coming from her.
His breath is in her ear, his hand a gentle soothing pressure petting the back of her head. “No one can hear you,” he promises, soft and brimming with an understanding that makes her chest ache with every gasping breath. “No one can see.” His cheek presses against her temple, a could-be-kiss. “Let go.”
And she does.
