Broken by the Horde King (Horde Kings of Dakkar #4) - Zoey Draven Page 0,74

my horde.”

My nostrils flared as I desperately tried to get air into my lungs.

“Not at the saruk,” I voiced, my brows dropping, my lips turning down.

Obviously, I had always known he had to leave. Then again, I had always believed I would go with him.

“At her burial. You never came. I had written to you, begging you to come, and then you ignored me and instead told your mother to give us your regards? As if we were strangers to you? It hurt, Kiran. It always has and it always will.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked quietly, his eyes suddenly rapt and intense. “Whose burial?”

Something seemed to burst inside me. All the emotion, perhaps, that I had kept bottled up and buried for so long. All coming the surface.

“My mother’s!” I cried, tears swimming in my eyes as I stumbled away from his grip, which had suddenly loosened.

“Neffar?” he rasped, frozen in place, his lips parting. “What are you talking about, Maeva?”

His reaction made me hesitate. It didn’t make sense. Kiran wasn’t a liar. Why would he pretend he didn’t know?

Nik, I thought, my resolve hardening. He had to have known. Even if my own message hadn’t reached him, his mother had written to him and received his prompt reply by thesper. She’d read his letter to me herself.

“Don’t do this, Kiran,” I pleaded, my voice shaking. “Please don’t do this to me! Don’t tell me you don’t even remember or I will truly never forgive you for it.”

An intense expression flashed over his face.

Realization. Disbelief. Grief. Anger. Guilt.

All combined into one aching look that made my chest crumble. That made me stumble away because all at once, I felt my whole world tilt. I felt my reality twist and become something else.

All at once, I had to look away. I spun, my breath coming quick and hard, my vision beginning to sway. I stared out at the lake. Unseeing. Then I crumbled to the ground, falling to the sandy bank in a heap as my legs gave out on me.

Then I said the words that were somehow the truth. I had seen them in his expression and though it had been nine years, I still knew him. They were the truth, though I didn’t know how. Or why.

“You didn’t know,” I said quietly. I envisioned my words drifting across the surface of the lake. “You didn’t know.”

I didn’t know where my words would end up. How far would they go? How far could they drift across the lake?

Silence stretched between us, heavy and tense.

And even though I had already cried for the first time in eight years that night, I felt my shoulders begin to shake. I felt my body vibrate, like it was coming to life, like it was trying to purge every deep-rooted emotion within me, emotions that felt poisonous and hateful.

My breath was short, coming quick. I couldn’t vokking breathe.

Then the tears came, a flood of them, breaking from me. Then came the sobs, deep, aching, rasping things that felt like they were ripping my body apart.

“Seffi,” came his voice. I felt him drop to his knees behind me, right at my back. I felt his arms come around me, felt him pull me deep into his chest until I was cocooned in his embrace. Until all I could feel was his heat and his heartbeat throbbing against my spine. And his scent, warm and familiar, all around me. “Seffi.”

His forehead dropped to the back of my head and I felt his breath on my neck as he tried to steady his own.

“Seffi, I am sorry,” he murmured to me, his arms tightening when he felt my sobs come harder. “I am so sorry for your lomma.”

I couldn’t see anything through my tears so I simply closed my eyes. My hand lifted from where it was clenched in the sand and I gripped his forearm, my fingers brushing the hot metal of his Vorakkar cuff, wide on his wrist. My nails dug into his flesh but it was only to hold him to me.

I wasn’t capable of any more words.

Only tears. And maybe those tears were enough. Maybe those tears were like words, falling down my face like a difficult conversation, a conversation long overdue.

I cried on the edge of that lake, with his arms around me, with the moon over us.

I cried until I couldn’t anymore.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Sitting on the edge of the bank, I clutched Maeva in my arms tighter, though I was careful