Page 50 of Haunted Nightmares
My heart splits wide open as he backs away from me, head in his hands as jet black tears roll down his face.
“Wraith.” I reach for him, pushing myself through the pain to go to him now that I’m free. “Honey, please?—“
“Zephyr had marks here, too,” he says quietly as he snatches my wrist and tugs me forward. “This is the only way to know for sure, to see if you’re clean. If they aren’t there, I’ll take my words back and kill you where you sit, then I’ll wander into the swamp to end my own suffering because Icannot do thisany longer.”
I curl my fingers loosely into my palm as I watch him, my mate refusing to look at my face. “And if they are?”
“I deserve to die anyway. I couldn’t protect her in our last life together, and I’ll have tried to kill her in this one, and I can’t live with myself for both.”
Holding my breath, I don’t make a move as Wraith slowly opens my hand one finger at a time to reveal the circular, raised symbol sitting in the middle of it. And when I lift my right hand, open and showing the same, he stutters out a strained sob before cutting it short and scrambling off the table.
“Wraith!” I yell as he falls to the dirt floor, immediately reaching for him again as I try to follow.
“No! Stay back, stay there!”
“Honey, stop, please. Let me?—“
“No!” His voice thunders around us, shaking everything inside the tent as he scoots as far away from me as possible before stopping just shy of the door. “You can not… it isn’t… you can’t be real.”
Slowly so I don’t scare him away, I carefully get off the table and inch toward him. “I am, baby. It’s really me, and I am really here.”
“I watched you… I watched you die.”
“I know.” I hold up my hands as I pause in front of him and cautiously lower myself to my knees. “You watched me die, that was real too, but I’m here now.”
Wraith starts shaking his head. “No, no I don’t understand. You were dead, I watched you burn, I saw the scorch marks. My ring…” He holds up his hand to show me the signet firmly on his pinky finger before whispering, “You were gone from me, Zephyr, I died that day too.”
My eyes well with tears as I scoot closer, desperate to reach out and hold my mate, to comfort him and show him that I’m here and I’m never leaving him again.
But I know I can’t, not yet.
Wraith is struggling to process this and not just because anyone would but because he’s right.
The day I died, he did too, and his body, his mind, they are living proof of how a love as deep as ours can be fatal.
And I can’t sit by and let it kill him any longer.
“Look at me. I need you to look at me, honey.” I inch close enough that we’re almost touching, close enough to feel the extreme cold emanating from his body but when my mate finally shifts his gaze to mine, I know without a doubt he’s still out of reach. “We both died that day, Wraith, but I’m here now. By the grace of the gods you so often curse, I am here, I’m alive, and I’m yours all over again.”
Oops.
Looks like I messed up again.
The way the desperation and heartache on his face suddenly switch back to that unbridled anger, the way his dark and devious grin spreads across his face, they reinforce that tenfold and I have a feeling I’m in for something even I might not be able to handle.
“You’re mine, yeah?” Wraith straightens his posture before tilting his head. “Mine in all ways, just as before? Because you still want me, still need me, stilllove meas you did in your previous life?”
I nod my head slowly as my heart begins to race.
“Can you see yourself making us a new home? Sharing espresso in the evenings, reading by firelight before turning in for the day?”
“Y-yes,” I say as my throat gets tight and a lone tear escapes down my cheek.
Wraith arches a brow as he slowly traces the symbol in my hand. “Do you envision yourself baring my young? Mothering my hell spawn as we rule side by side over our people?”
Another nod has panic setting in because while these were my dreams and still are my plans for our future, something about the look on his face and the tone in his voice tells me that’s not really where this is going.
And wherever it is, it’s not going to be good.
