Pure Requiem - Aja James Page 0,36

would have found love again. Eventually.

But I won’t ever fucking let her go.

She’s mine.

“Come here, ana Ishtar,” I repeat the command, my voice frayed and guttural.

I will not go to her. She must come to me.

She must choose me.

Over and over I will make her choose me. I will lay out all the ugly truths. No more secrets. No more protecting either of our sensibilities. She must take me as I am, with everything I’ve done, and everything I have yet to do.

I need her to keep choosing me.

Finally, she speaks.

“You’re going to keep fighting. You’re becoming the Pure Ones’ General again, aren’t you.”

None of her statements are questions. I cannot tell from the flatness of her tone whether she is resigned, angry, or something else.

A shiver of undiluted fear racks through my body. Not even when facing Dark legions or Medusa’s endless depravities have I ever been this afraid.

Will she choose to let me go? Has she finally decided that this is not what she wants in a Mate? That I am not who she wants?

“Yes,” I utter, unrelenting. “I will never stop fighting to protect those I love.”

My lungs freeze in my chest, my heart in my throat, as I await her reaction.

Softly, almost soundlessly, she slowly comes to me.

I hold my breath, my fists clenched at my sides to keep from reaching for her.

Choose me, I silently beseech her in my mind, though I do not telepath the thought.

Choose me even though I hurt you, even though I made you suffer. Even though I still make you suffer.

Even though I am not worthy. Choose me anyway. Because you love me as helplessly and as endlessly as I love you.

At last, I feel her hands grasp my waist gently before clasping together at the small of my back. In the same breath, we shudder together as she lays her head on my chest.

“Okay,” she murmurs simply against my heart.

I inhale deeply, once, twice, taking in the air I didn’t even realize I’d been depriving myself, and wrap my arms around her too.

“But you can’t argue if I want to fight alongside you,” she states mulishly. “And you’re not going on any missions until you can defeat my Great White Beast. Think of it as practice. I’m sure my sis—Medusa’s dragon form is far more ferocious and dangerous. If you can’t beat me, then you won’t be able to beat her. That’s my condition. Take it or leave it.”

I take another deep breath, this one filled with gladness.

“Aye,” I reply. “I’ll take it.”

I feel her tilt her face up to look at me.

She doesn’t speak for a while. I wonder what she sees.

“If we’re sharing truths, Ninigiku of my heart, then you must know that nothing I have suffered, as you put it, compares to what you went through. Your sacrifices. I would have endured anything, lost everything, a hundred times over if that’s what it took for your people to have your freedom. For you to be free.”

“Ishtar—”

“No, it’s my turn,” she interrupts firmly, squeezing my back with her giant leopard strength, effectively shutting me up.

“I would never ever get over you if I lost you, Tal,” she says quietly but fervently, her whole body shaking with her conviction.

“There was no love within me for four thousand years while you were…gone. There was only the hope of Inanna. There is no other male for me but you. Not from the first, since I was ten summers and you were fourteen. I told you before that it will never change. No matter what happens, my heart will never, ever change. Not even death can stop my love. Are we clear?”

I swallow hard, my heart thumping thunderously in my chest.

“Yes.”

But she wasn’t done.

“I know what you suffered at Medusa’s hands,” she whispers huskily. “I saw your dreams, your memories.”

I shudder uncontrollably at those words, my body bracing instinctively to pull away.

But she won’t let me go. I’m beginning to realize that she will never let me go.

“I lived some of them with you,” she continues in that low, raspy tone.

I want to make her stop speaking, but I don’t. She has a right to speak these truths. I promised myself that there would be no more secrets between us.

“I know what she did. Endless hours, every day and night. I know how she hurt you. All the ways she…h-hurt you.”

My scars throb painfully at her words. Outside and within.

Deep within me where I am broken and bleeding, a ravaged mess