Page 61 of These Godly Lies
Kaia looks between them, a frown forming between her brows. “I apologize, did I say something—”
“No,” Khiran interrupts, wincing. His throat moves as he swallows. “Nothing like that. It’s only—there’s something I need to tell you, but I know it will hurt. And with the moon—I thought if I waited perhaps you wouldn’t feel it so sharply.”
She sits back, her dark eyes searching. “Pain is pain, whether I feel it now or later. You know that.” She folds her hands over her lap, chin tipped proudly. “Tell me.”
“She’s gone,” Khiran murmurs, as if saying the words softly could ease the blow. For the first time since Kaia said her name, he looks up and meets her stare. “Eira is gone.”
For a moment, Kaia only stares. The corners of her mouth twist into a gruesome smile as she shakes her head. “Gone?” she echoes. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know she—”
“Malik burned the meadow, Kaia. The house,Eira, they’re both gone. They killed her.”
Her smile wanes, the playful light in her eyes turning dark and cold. Kaia stands, backing away from the table but never dropping Khiran’s gaze. “No.” Her voice is deceptively calm; the warning groan ice gives seconds before it cracks.
Khiran flinches, his own pain twisting his expression into one of regret. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” she repeats. There’s an unsteadiness in the way she stands, a sway, as if she’s caught in a current of her own making. A whirlpool of every regret. She repeats the word, again and again, the volume and the despair mounting with every cry until it is a scream.
Around them, the ocean freezes—ice branching out like lightning and expanding in the cracks and crevices of the earth. Above them, the land shakes and the ocean swells. For four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, Alaska is reshaped by fissures and landslides in what will become known as the most powerful earthquake recorded in North America.
Only three souls will ever know it was heartbreak that made the earth split.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He worries. His distress split between two different women for two entirely different things: one drowning in despair and the other too beautifully optimistic to admit that loving him—staying with him—is bound to drag her into those same depths.
ALASKA, UNITEDSTATES
SPRING1964
The room is dark, a single candle burning on the nightstand. It casts long, flickering shadows along the cave walls. Anna waits until they’re curled up in bed, warm and wrapped in each other, before she speaks. “Will she be alright?”
Under her cheek, she feels a stutter in Khiran’s sigh. “I want to say yes, but…” His words trail off, but Anna doesn’t need them to understand.
The pain in Kaia’s scream will haunt her for lifetimes. In it,Anna heard the echo of her own fears mirrored back at her—a glimpse of what the future could hold if they aren’t careful. Her hand curls against his chest, searching for comfort in the steady beating of his heart. “She loved her.”
He covers her hand with his own, his thumb brushing over her knuckles. “She used to say they were soul mates. That, even though Eira refused to speak to her, they would always carry a piece of each other.” He turns his head, lips brushing her crown as he murmurs into her hair. “That piece of her died tonight.”
Tilting her face, she studies the heaviness in his answering stare. “I’m sorry you had to be the one to tell her,” she whispers. He looks so fragile in this moment, as if the weight of her words could break him.
He breathes a sigh so soft, itaches. Gently, his hand lifts to her brow, fingers tracing the shape of her face. “It felt like I was mourning her all over again,” he confesses, his eyes shutting as he presses his forehead against her own. His voice is fragile—riddled with a pain she can feel echoed in the hollow of her chest. “Anna… I cannot lose you. I couldn’t bear to live in a world that doesn’t have you in it.”
She wants to assure him, assureherself, that he could. That it would hurt, but he would still have a life waiting for him after the pain settled into an ache. She wants to, but she doesn’t. How can she, when the fear of losing him is crippling? Instead, she holds him close and lets the sound of his heartbeat soothe the fears she’s afraid to speak out loud.
Kaia doesn’t leave her room for four days.
Khiran brings her meals and sits with her. Anna wanders the cave system as far as she dares to pass the time. Sometimes she hears Kaia crying, the sound of her heartbreak echoing off the walls. Anna can feel it in her heart, a crushing weight on her chest, as her owngrief answers back. It’s a strange kind of torture. Anna thought she was done mourning Eira’s death, thought she had come to terms with never seeing her again, but Kaia’s despair reignites her own. The pain she thought she moved past creeping back with a choking grip, her throat tight and her eyes aching.
At night, she dreams of her.
Sometimes it’s an echo of a memory. Sometimes it’s a nightmare. They all feel too real. Too close to the truth. When she wakes, she’s dizzy with trying to comb through the tangled threads of memory and dreams. Some of them are so fragile, they break away like spider silk in her grasp—sticking to her skin, but unrecognizable. A handful of splintered, tangled strands without a full picture.
She doesn’t know where one ends and the other begins anymore—doesn’t know where that line is drawn in the sand because the tide of grief has washed it away. All she knows is that it hurts in ways she wasn’t prepared for. Anna has had centuries worth of loss, but she had always been prepared for it. Her eyes were open and her heart was guarded. Every relationship she forged was tempered with the knowledge that it would only ever be temporary—a fleeting chapter in her everlasting life.
Eira was different, because Anna believed her story would last as long as her own. She had never considered the possibility of losing her when they had been gifted with forever. She’s still not sure which hurts more deeply—knowing time is short or never knowing to say goodbye.
On the fourth day, Khiran finds her curled up in the sheets of their bed with a book in her hand. “I want to show you something.”
Anna looks up from the yellowed pages. Kaia’s book collection isn’t nearly as expansive as Khiran’s had been, but there were a few she recognized and more she didn’t. The tome she holds in her lap is leather bound, its pages whisper thin and brittle with age. The graceful looping language is one she doesn’t recognize, but she was content appreciating the illustrations until she could ask Khiran to interpret it for her.
