Page 65 of Falling for the Felid
“Am I too late?” the teen asks breathlessly. “We got lost.”
“You’re not too late,” Erik assures him. “Let’s get you some skates. What’s your name?”
I leave him to handle the kid, and I turn to the parent. Most of the forms have been filled out already, but there are some details I need to confi?—
Air sticks in my throat, and I cough to keep breathing. She’s dead. She was dead. How is she…?
“Ari?” The surprise in her voice assures me that she’s alive. Not dead. As does the wariness that races across her face, along with the cautious step back. “You’re almost the last person I expected to see here.”
“Yes—” I stop and clear the rust from my throat. “Yes,” I repeat. “I felt that way for a while, too. It’s only a temporary secondment, as part of the DEA’s outreach partnership.”
“Oh?” Her face relaxes slightly, but she’s still guarded, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand why.
“I work for the DEA, Meara. For the king’s security team. I l-left not long after you… died.” I shake my head at the absurdity of the sentence. “What happened?”
“You left?” It’s her turn to shake her head. “Of course, you must have. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. It’s just… I’ve never seen anyone else frombefore.”
“Me either. Well, only in battle,” I confess, and she swallows hard enough for me to see, even several feet away.
“Why did you leave?” she asks, and I take a step closer to her. This is the last thing I want to talk about, ever, and especially not where someone might overhear. I’ve spent a long time rebuilding my life and atoning for my past, and I don’t want people to know what I came from.
Maybe Raðulfr’s right and I need to allow myself more of a life, but that doesn’t erase the past or the way people will hate me.
“I heard something that… troubled me. Enough that I went looking for answers, for another perspective. I found the truth.”
“And you couldn’t stay.” She nods.
“I surrendered to the army, and they brought me to the king. He allowed me to swear service to him.” I shrug. We were never really close, and I’m not comfortable telling her details.
“You surrendered,” she repeats, awed. “You always did have too much honor for your own good. What if they’d killed you immediately?”
I don’t reply. She doesn’t need to know that I’d expected that to be the most likely outcome.
Meara sighs. “Well, I didn’t do anything as stupid as that. You obviously know the shield over our compound collapsed?”
I nod, though she doesn’t need me to. There’s no other reason I would have assumed she’d died.
“When the shield came down, I tried to stay close to my family, but we got separated, and then they were… gone. Adragon patrol found me hours later—I could barely breathe by then because of the miasma. They never knew—” She pauses and looks around to make sure nobody’s close. “—whereI’d come from. They took me to a settlement and I just… began a new life.”
“I’m glad,” I say sincerely. “And now you have a family. Congratulations.”
We both glance over to where her son is taking his first tentative steps onto the ice, Gline there to guide him.
“It wasn’t easy at first,” she admits. “Nothing was the way I’d been told it was, and I was scared of everyone. Eventually I made friends, and then I started to relax.”
“Did it make you feel more secure when you told your partner everything?” There’s a wistful note in my voice. I’m in a different situation to Meara—she was only a teenager when she, er, didn’t die, and hadn’t begun to perform the duties we all got assigned when we got older. I doubt anyone could have blamed her for being born to parents who made bad choices, though I understand why her young self would have been afraid of that.
“I never did.” She shakes her head vehemently. “And I never will. I won’t risk losing everything I have now.” The look she gives me is frightening in its intensity. “I’ll do whatever I must to protect my life, Ari. Don’t even think?—”
I hold up my hands, shocked and sad. “Your story isn’t mine to tell. Nobody will hear it from me.”
She stares guardedly at me for a moment, then says stiffly, “Do I need to stay for the session?”
“No, but there’s some paperwork.” I walk through what we need, and then she leaves, promising to be back before the session ends. I watch her go, every breath I take searing through me.
I cannot—will not—believe that the people I’ve fought for and lived with for thousands of years would hate or harm a young woman simply for being born into a particular family. Mearawas practically a child when she was lost. Nobody could assume she was anything but innocent. Misguided, perhaps, as we all were, but innocent nonetheless.
And yet, thousands of years later, still she fears they will.
