Chapter 668: Yesterday, I Still Had You

"Tristan, your neck is—"

"I don’t give a fuck about my neck."

"I KNOW you don’t. That’s the problem." Lucian’s voice cracked in half. The controlled register he had held the entire conversation was finally hitting the load limit, and the load was the image of his brother’s neck slowly turning black, and the image was too heavy for the voice carrying it, and the voice gave.

"You don’t give a fuck about anything anymore," he continued. "That’s what the dark magic does. It takes the man who cared about everything and convinces him nothing matters. You used to care about your neck. You used to care about your health. You used to care about what River saw when she looked at you. When did you stop? Can you even remember?"

"You are trying to take her from me." Tristan’s irises flooded black.

Lucian saw it happen. Watched the green get swallowed by the black the way daylight gets swallowed by an eclipse.

"Take her from you? TAKE her?" His voice buckled. "I have spent every day since your wedding making sure she STAYED with you. I held YOUR wife’s grief in my chest through the matebond and never said a word. I watched her love you and I was GLAD, Tristan. I was glad because she was happy and you were happy and the two people I love most in this world were building something beautiful and I would have watched from the outside forever if it meant you got to keep it."

"You were glad." Flat. Testing the words. "My brother was in love with my wife and he was GLAD I had her. BULLSHIT."

Lucian studied his friend with concern. "This isn’t you, Tristan."

"This isn’t me? THIS ISN’T ME?" Tristan’s voice went raw. "My best friend just told me he’s been in love with my wife since before I met her. What version of me is supposed to be standing here right now, Lucian? What face am I supposed to be making? TELL me. Because I don’t have a protocol for this. I don’t have a contingency plan for my BROTHER stabbing me in the chest on a Tuesday evening."

"Look at me, Tristan. LOOK at me. One month ago, could you have screamed at me like that? One month ago the man who told me I’d always have a home, would THAT man be standing here with black veins in his neck calling his brother a liar?"

Tristan flinched. A full-body flinch, the kind that comes when a wound you’ve been ignoring gets hit directly.

"The dark magic is changing you. Every week there’s less of you and more of it, and you’re so busy trying to fix everything that you haven’t noticed you’re disappearing. I’m watching my brother die in slow motion and he won’t even look down at his own goddamn neck."

"Stop calling me your brother." Tristan’s voice was quiet. Wrecked. "You don’t get to use that word right now."

The sentence hit Lucian’s chest like a fist. His mouth opened. Closed. The air left his lungs in a way that wasn’t breathing, it was collapse.

Tristan’s fists were clenched so tight the tendons stood out like cables. The veins pulsed, twice, three times, and his eyes were wet. Furious. Wounded in the way only betrayal from family can wound.

"Do you know what the worst part is?" he asked. "It’s that I’m not even surprised. Some part of me always knew. The way you looked at her. The way you were always there. The way your voice changed when you said her name. I saw it. I saw all of it. And I told myself I was imagining things because the alternative was that my brother was lying to me, and that wasn’t possible. Because you were Lucian. And Lucian didn’t lie."

The words Lucian didn’t lie hung between them like a headstone for something that used to be alive.

"You’re right. You deserve better than what I gave you." Lucian’s voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "But I need you alive. You can hate me until the earth takes us both. You can never speak to me again. You can hit me right now if it helps."

"Hit you?" Tristan’s laugh was a gutted, airless thing. "I don’t want to hit you, Lucian. I want to go back to yesterday when my brother was still my brother and my wife was still my wife and the worst thing in my life was the veins on my neck. I want to go back to when the list of people who would never betray me had your name on it. That’s the only thing I want from you."

Lucian couldn’t.

The silence answered for him.

"Tristan, this dark magic is doing things to you. You were dealt a horrible hand. I’m sorry."

"You’re sorry." Tristan shook his head. "You couldn’t even tell me the truth. How are you going to save me when you couldn’t even be honest with me? What else is a lie, Lucian? The friendship? The loyalty? Every time you told me you were riding south for the alliance, was that a lie too? Every meal? Every handshake? How far back does it go? Because I’m standing here trying to find the floor and I can’t feel it anymore."

His voice broke on the last word.

The break echoed off the stone. Came back. Hit them both again. Tristan heard it and his jaw locked and his eyes went from furious to glassed and his breathing changed from the fast, aggressive rhythm of a man in a fight to the slower, deeper rhythm of a man watching someone he loves come apart and realizing, against every ounce of rage he was holding, that the coming apart was real.

"You want to know why I’m telling you now?" Lucian wiped his face with the back of his hand. "Because your wife is disappearing, Tristan. And you’re too sick to see it. And she’s doing it without making a sound. Without asking for help. Without burdening a single soul, because that woman would rather dissolve than inconvenience the people she loves."

Tristan went rigid.