He had been gone for minutes, and I already felt his absence like an aching emptiness in the center of my chest. The tent was colder without him. Goosebumps were forming on my naked skin. And I could already feel the looming shadow of anxiety encroaching at the edge of my
thoughts.
Anxiety. Reality.
But I tried to take just one more moment to lie there in the afterglow. I flattened my palm against the bedroll beside me. Warm. His scent — our scent — still hung in the air, sweet and familiar and unfamiliar all at once.
I’d heard about it, of course — all that sex could be. But sex didn’t even feel like the right word for what this had been. Sex was the tool I had wielded for survival, practiced and impersonal. This was… more. It wasn’t just about the bodies, or even the physical pleasure of it. It was vulnerable. It was trusting. And I never thought that it could feel so good to open myself up that way.
But gods, it had. So good it was terrifying.
I was still laying there like that, my hand pressed to those sheets as I begged them not to cool, when I felt it.
A voice. The voice.
{You got what you wanted.}
Reshaye was weak and tired, its words gritty with exhaustion that echoed in my own bones.
That brought me back to reality, fast. It hit me so suddenly that I didn’t have time to steel myself before my body stiffened, the memories of yesterday and the nightmares I had endured careening into me like a physical force.
My stomach turned and I prayed that it wasn’t talking about Max.
{Revenge,} it whispered. {I gave you what you wanted.}
My relief was only momentary. The image of those nightmares, of my hand on the door, of Max’s face, of the mother’s wails—
{Yet, you are angry with me.}
My heart stopped.
No.
{You are. I smell it. I taste it.}
It turned colder and colder, coiling around my thoughts like a snake.
I am not angry with you.
{You cannot lie to me.}
Its confused hurt seeped into my blood, tainting it in unfurling tendrils. I hated the way that it turned over all of my thoughts, encroaching dangerously close on the ones that I wanted only for myself.
Please— I began,
But then, everything stopped.
And I felt a sudden jolt of sharp, furious betrayal.
It brushed a memory of last night — the faint image of Max’s hand running over my stomach. I yanked the memories away from it before it could see more, stuffing them into the back of my mind.
But it clung to the image. That one little fragment. Max’s fingers on my skin again. Backwards. Again. Backwards. Again.
{What is this.} A daydream.
{Show me what this is.}
It embarrasses me for you to see my fantasies—
{You cannot lie to me! You cannot!}
The words shook me, a roar that tore from inside my body.
{Now I understand. You are abandoning me just as he did. The two of you, together—}
No! Never—
But its next words hissed through me with the acid green of jealousy.
{I gave you everything. I gave both of you everything.
And you betray me, too?} I—
Gods, I was tired. I was so tired, and so afraid, and my mind couldn’t form the right words— and all this, when it had locked me up—
{I DID lock you up! Just as you did to me!}
You were going to kill innocent people, and you were going to—
{I was giving you what you had asked of me. I gave you what you wanted and you gave yourself to HIM. The two of you conspiring against me.}
Fingers on skin. Two seconds of memory, over and over again, cycled obsessively.
{Show me the rest.}
No. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. That was the only thing that was real, the only thing that was mine. I forced myself to calm down. This was dangerous. I needed to be careful. I needed to count my dancing steps.
You gave me gifts beyond my imagination. I would never
—
Pain crackled at the edge of my vision, stealing the
breath from my lungs. My fingers tightened around fistfuls of linen.
It slammed itself against my thoughts, raking fury down the back of my skull, flooding over my tongue with the sharp pain of heartbreak.
All I could think about were Max’s memories. His memories of Reshaye, the day it had taken everything from him.
All I could think about was everything I had to lose, here on sheets still warm from everything precious to me.
And in my panic, I threw at it the only thing I could think to offer. The thing it wanted most of all. The thing that I had always sold in exchange for the safety of myself or the people I cared for:
I love you. I love you, Reshaye.
One terrible moment. Fingers on skin, again, again, again.
{You cannot lie to me,} it hissed, as it fell back into silence like a wave retreating from the shore, leaving behind nothing but the scarred remnants of its fury.
I NEED you! I cried.
Raw. Honest. The ugliest truth of all. But by then, it was gone.
