Page 69 of Prior Claim
If there were no Merchari, no prior claim, no Rei, then he would melt willingly, no breaking needed. “I wish I could let you.”
“You can’t protect anything like this. I could keep you for days, weeks, years. No one would know. No one would come looking. No need to fight. No need to play dangerous games. You’d be mine and mine alone.”
Tears ran from Sevastyan’s eyes. Yes. He would take that future, if only for himself. But Rei would be alone. Rei would wait and wait in that condo as the food ran out. He’d call Alexi eventually. He would be whisked away, kilometers and an ocean put between Rei and the friends he longed for. He’d be beyond the protection of Sevastyan’s promise, cherished, trapped, and used. Safe and suffocated. Damned. Clawing for an ending that would never arrive.
Sevastyan reached for the vision, drawing it in technicolor for his mind and his mind alone. That was the future unless he could make himself speak.
There was a goddam lock in his throat. He opened his lips, tried to breathe past the resistance. All for nothing.
He’d done too well. Secrets kept at the end of a gun couldn’t be unlocked like a door with a key. There was no keyhole in this mental vault, only solid walls.
“Tell me what you need,” Ellisandre murmured.
“Pain.”
“You’re in pain. I could shoot you, it wouldn’t matter. You’re not afraid of pain.” Ellisandre stroked their fingers over his face, catching on his busted lip and swelling cheek. “Pain never made you do anything. It also never stopped you.”
“You have.”
“I’m here.”
“I’m not.” He couldn’t touch them. He wanted to.
“Tell me where you are?”
Where was he?
He closed his eyes, searching. He was whirling through the thousands of hallways he’d walked in his three decades on earth: London, the Yadro, Seoul, Osaka, New York, Atlanta, Mexico City, Barcelona, Cairo. So many hallways, so many halls. So many doors. He couldn’t touch the handles, not with his hands trapped above him.
“Nowhere.”
Ellisandre’s hands were on his face. Their breath was on his cheeks. “Come to the gates of Assyria.”
He could do that. The hall coalesced around him. He was walking toward the lamassu, its massive body towering above him, all beastly muscle and divine masculinity.
“Let’s start again, Vast. You and I. Journeys end and journeys begin at city gates. Fortunes won and fortunes lost. You’ve summoned me from beyond our death, from the end of our tragedy. Now we are two ghosts here together. Shades gather for reasons. Speak the reason.”
“It’s all breaking.” He could say that. He could push just that much beyond the vault of his mind.
“Name what is breaking.”
“Anton. His will. Gone. Worse than gone. Faithless. My mission, the prior claim, the reason . . . I couldn’t be yours.”
Sevastyan clung to the imagery of the lamassu as he spoke. If he could stay there, in that place, then he was not fully real. His temples throbbed and his ribs ached. That sick feeling kept his limbs loose and heavy. His goddess’s weight across his hips and chest anchored him.
“It’s safe here, Vast. Surrounded by stone cut by hands whose names are lost, we are myth and mystery and history. Only the gods can hear us.”
Sevastyan turned in place, seeing the relic and the stone reliefs, sensing the silence. Myth and mystery. How terrible myths could be.
“Tell me the why of the lamassu, Vast. Here and now, of all the places in this city, tell me the reason for the lamassu.”
“They protect.”
That was as close as he could come.
“Tell me why you cannot say the name of what you protect.”
His throat would not work, even in the spell Ellisandre had woven. If he could only pull Ellisandre inside this damn vault of his mind, into the safe space where he had put every unspeakable thing in his heart, then he could show them.
