“Lahn –” I whispered.
“But she withholds from me.”
Oh shit.
When I’d cleared him, I came away from the wall and started to back toward the door.
Lahn came at me again. “She withholds her xaxsah. She withholds her golden honey. She withholds her claws. She withholds her spirit. And, since she bore my children, she withholds even her time.”
“Uh…” I mumbled again.
I hit door and didn’t even get close to finding the knob. Lahn moved fast, I was up, across the room and on my back in the bed, Lahn on top of me. I was winded, his face was in my face and he was beyond furious, he was seriously f**king pissed, him and the brutal, golden spirit that was shining in his eyes.
And he was something else. Something I didn’t get. Something I couldn’t read. Something that didn’t belong in his eyes. It was wrong there.
Cataclysmically wrong.
“I will not take you by force for I know you will use it as well as reason never to forgive me and now I know it to be true, from the name your father called me, that you never will.”
“Lahn –” I whispered again as what I saw in his eyes, held by his spirit, started to dawn.
He talked over me. “But you should know before I leave you to be my queen only for our people, my wife only to be mother to Tunahn and Isis and I let you go, that I suffered for my mistake, I suffered for it greatly when I found you left me.”
My heart thumped harder just as my belly melted.
Yes, I knew what that was in his eyes.
Defeat.
Oh God.
I had to stop this. Now.
“Honey –” I tried speaking softly, using an endearment he liked as I gently put my hands on him but I failed to break through.
“I spent five months agonizing that I had lost you forever, haunted in sleep and in wake with the vision of your spirit fading to nothing in your eyes, knowing I’d crushed it to death and I’d forced you to escape me. Me, your king, your warrior, your Lahn, yours, in the end being no better than Dortak.”
Oh God.
“Lahn –” I started as my body softened under his and my arms wrapped around him.
“And knowing with every day that passed when you didn’t return to me, you were never going to find your way back to me. And despairing as each day moved into the next with no word from Karrim that I wouldn’t find a way to bring you home.”
I slid my hands to his front and up to curl them light around his neck. “Baby, listen to –”
“My golden doe, gone. My child with her. Never to see her heavy with my seed, never to look upon my warrior or golden daughter, never again to feel her body at sleep in our bed next to mine.”
“Lahn, seriously, honey, please listen –”
“Then Karrim finds a witch to bring you home to me, we give her trunks of gold only for you to come back broken.”
God! He needed to shut the f**k up so I could f**king talk!
“Lahn!” I snapped urgently, my fingers digging into his neck but I still didn’t break through.
“And I did that, I broke you and the only hint you gift me with that there is a possibility my golden goddess lives on somewhere inside is when you found the strength to deliver upon me our children.”
Jeez, when my man got on a tangent, there was no shutting him the f**k up!