Chapter 669: Who The Hell Is Catching Her?

"She moved out of your chambers. She broke her chosen tie with you. She looked at the man she loves, the man she CHOSE, and told him to love another woman." Lucian’s jaw trembled and he locked it. "Have you ever thought about what that moment actually felt like for her? Because I have. I’ve thought about it every night since."

Tristan’s eyes narrowed.

"You think I don’t already know that my wife is hurting? You think I don’t see it? That I am that wrapped up in my own suffering that I am blind to it?" His volume increased with every word until he was yelling. "YOU KNOW NOTHING. SHE IS MINE. MY WIFE. I KNOW HER."

"Then ACT like it!" Lucian roared back, and the roar surprised both of them because Lucian didn’t roar, Lucian controlled, Lucian modulated, and the modulation had just blown its last fuse. "If you know her, then you know she’s drowning. If you know her, then you know she won’t ask for a lifeline. If you know her, then you know that every day you spend fighting the dark magic and ignoring her is a day she spends convincing herself she wasn’t worth fighting for."

"Don’t you DARE tell me I’m ignoring her."

"You’re not ignoring her. You’re LOSING her. There’s a difference and the difference is that ignoring is a choice and losing is what happens when a man is so buried under his own destruction that he can’t see the woman next to him building her own grave."

Tristan’s chest heaved. His eyes were red. His fists were shaking at his sides.

"She is my WIFE."

"She is your wife. And she is my matebond. And she is ALONE, Tristan. She is alone in a palace full of people because the man she chose is being eaten alive and the man who was chosen for her can’t speak. So who is helping her? Who is catching her? WHO?"

The silence that followed was the loudest sound either of them had ever heard.

"Your wife told you to love another woman," Lucian said, breaking the silence after a long moment. "And it destroyed her but she did it anyway because your survival mattered more to her than her own heart. She walked out of that room and fell apart in a hallway where nobody could see, and she put herself back together, and she came out SMILING, Tristan. She came out smiling like she hadn’t just killed the best thing in her life with her own hands."

"She smiled after she left?" The question came out of Tristan in pieces.

The veins receded. Slowly. Reluctantly. Like a predator retreating but keeping eye contact.

"Yes." Lucian’s voice was barely functioning. "And then she went to her room and I felt her fall apart through the matebond for six hours straight, and she never made a sound, Tristan. Your wife destroyed herself to save you and she did it silently because she didn’t want anyone to carry it with her."

"She never said..." Tristan’s voice was a whisper. The anger was draining out of him like blood from a wound.

"Of course she never said. When has River ever said? When has that woman ever once in her life opened her mouth and asked for what she needed? She carries everything. Every burden. Every grief. Every sacrifice. She carries it alone and smiles and makes sure everyone around her is comfortable while she’s hemorrhaging, and I am DONE watching it happen to a woman whose matebond is in my chest telling me she’s breaking."

Both of them breathing hard. Both of them wrecked. The terrace between them felt like a battlefield after the last volley, smoke still hanging, nobody moving.

Lucian’s shoulders dropped. The anger left his body the way a wave leaves a shore: all at once, leaving behind something flattened and wet and raw.

"I’m tired, Tristan. I am so tired of holding this."

Tristan was quiet for a long time. Then he leaned back against the balustrade. The posture was different from before. Before, he’d been leaning away from Lucian. Now he was just leaning. Holding himself up. The distinction was small and it was everything.

"Then stop holding it."

Four words. Barely audible. Delivered without looking at Lucian, because looking at Lucian would have cost something Tristan was not ready to pay, but the words were enough. The words were a door left open by a man who was not ready to walk through it but was not willing to lock it either.

"You’re my family, Tristan. I love you. And I love her. And I know those two things can’t live in the same sentence without one of them catching fire, and I’m telling you both of them anyway because the lying is over. It’s over. Whatever comes next, whatever you decide, whatever this costs me, at least it’s real. For the first time in years, every word between us is real."

Tristan sat down. Not on a chair. Not on the balustrade. On the ground. The Crown Prince of Aelindris sat on the stone floor of the east terrace and put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook once. The shaking was silent. And the silence was worse than any scream Lucian had ever heard on any battlefield, because this was a man realizing the woman he loved had been destroying herself to save him. And it was much worse than he had thought.

Lucian sat down beside him. Shoulder to shoulder. The way they’d sat as children. The way they’d sat after battles. The way they sat when the world was too heavy to stand in and the only option was to lower yourself to the ground next to the person who understood, and sit there, and breathe, and let the silence between you become the kind of silence that held instead of hid.

Neither of them spoke.

The wind carried the quiet, and the quiet carried everything.