everything. I crawled into bed and prayed to anything that might be listening to give me enough healing and power to help us get through this, and not weigh us down. I couldn’t help but feel like I was the one that was going to break us, that my arrogance and need to handle it all myself was going to be the reason we fell apart.
18
Mae
After Alastair left the table, the silence fell like an ax. Hunter looked miserable, guilt and self-hatred swirling around him like a tornado, and Ellis looked like he’d just committed murder. In some ways, I supposed he had. I knew he’d done what was necessary to save Alastair’s life, but the damage it had done to his relationship with Hunter was undeniable. A part of them would never forget what happened, that much was clear.
How were we supposed to recover from that?
I stood and pulled my chair with me as I walked to sit between them. When I sat back down, I took each of their hands in my own and said, “I know it feels like there is nothing you can do to fix what happened between you, what you had to do to save Alastair, but don’t let it tear you apart just because you’re too scared to talk about it. I know you’re both very private and don’t normally do that kind of thing, but in this case, it might be necessary.”
“I can’t talk about it, not yet,” Hunter said before he squeezed my hand once. Then he pushed away from the table and left, disappearing down the hall.
I sat holding Ellis’ hand, rubbing my thumb over the soft, fleshy part of his palm. He was still mostly a mystery to me. I knew he had a hard past, that being a unicorn shifter meant being hunted his whole life, and that he hadn’t trusted me until I’d saved his life from those red caps. All that being said, I wanted to know Ellis better.
The emotions that had burned between us had ranged from hatred to lust and more. I felt desperate to know how he was feeling in that moment, to know how I could help him, but there was nothing I could do, not really. After what he’d made Hunter do, this was all psychological.
“Are you okay?” I asked, knowing it was a stupid question, but needing something to break the wall of silence he’d put up around himself.
“I don’t know.” Ellis looked forlorn, there was no other way to describe it. I didn’t expect him to say more, but he was clearly thinking about a lot, so I left him to it. Sometimes, the best thing someone could do was just be there with you, not filling the silence or questioning you, but just having their presence there was enough. “I wanted to give Alastair a choice, but he was too far gone from the blood loss. Now I’ve embedded myself in him in a way that is irreversible, and he might hate me for it.”
“Is that really what you think? That he’d rather be dead than have some of your horn in him?”
Ellis sighed and shoved his free hand through his hair. As much as I hated to notice that he had chosen to use his non-dominant hand to do it, so he didn’t have to take his hand from mine, I couldn’t help it. A part of me wanted to smile and dance that Ellis wanted to hold my hand.
“I know he doesn’t want to die, but is he okay with the cost? I mean, I don’t know how this will tie us together. Doing something like that…it’s got unpredictable consequences. It’s why unicorn hunters usually kill us and harvest more than just our horn. Who would want to buy unicorn horn if it got you metaphysically attached to the unicorn it came from?” He snorted at the end of the bitter words, and I squeezed his hand. “That’s not even getting into what it destroyed between me and Hunter. What I asked him to do…it’s not something a friend asks, let alone someone you consider a brother. Now he can’t even look at me.”
“You think Hunter is disgusted with you?” I asked, trying to clarify.
“That I’d make him do something like that, that I’d do something like that without Alastair’s consent, yeah.” Ellis reached past me and picked up the glass of amber liquid that Hunter had left behind and drained it.
“Hunter isn’t disgusted with you.