The statement didn’t require an answer, and he didn’t give her one.
Instead, after a deep breath, he squared his shoulders. “Can you forgive me?”
The question was gruff, his eyes glassy as he met hers.
She opened her mouth, then pinched it shut. Once. Twice.
When she continued staring at the ceiling, silent, he spoke again. “You don’t owe it to me. I know that. My love doesn’t buy me absolution, and I didn’t say it to sway you. I said it because you should know. No matter what happens between us now, you should know that you’re loved. Even if you don’t forgive me.”
Her cheeks were already tight with salt, and she was crying again. Still.
He loved her. She believed that. And in some ways—in many ways—he really was such a good man. So good, she’d almost believed they could make it work, against all odds.
But she knew the answer to his question, because she knew herself.
She didn’t want to say it, but she would. She had to.
“No,” she finally said. “I can’t forgive you.”
He made a raw, wounded sound, and that only made the tears come faster.
Rolling her head to the side, she finally looked at him again. He was a blur through her flooded eyes, his expression indistinct, and maybe that was for the best.
She knuckled away the wetness from her chin. “I want to go home.”
His love for her didn’t buy him forgiveness, and hers didn’t mean she’d offer it. Which meant this would be their last time alone together. Ever.
When he reached for her hand, though, she didn’t pull away.
Her fingers were trembling and cold, and so were his. He pressed a tender kiss into her palm, then carefully placed her hand back into her lap.
He clicked his seat belt and put the car in drive. “When we get back to Berkeley, I’ll pack my things.”
Her breath hitched again, hard.
But she didn’t argue.
Gods of the Gates: A Howl from Below (Book 2)
E. Wade
“Build a pyre,” Dido told her sister, Anna, as the wind snapped the sails of Aeneas’s fleet and speeded him away and away and away. “Upon it, place all the possessions of our life together. Our bridal bed. The clothing he once wore. All the weapons he abandoned.”
As he abandoned me.
Once, she too was a weapon. A sword, shiny and sharp and lethal. The Berber king Iarbas had found her so, when she’d arrived in North Africa and begged from him a small plot of land, a place of refuge before she resumed her travels.
“Only such land as can be encompassed by an ox hide,” she’d pled sweetly.
His agreement had come after the amused, tolerant laughter of his men. His wise advisers.
Silly woman. Silly request.
First, she honed her blade until a fingertip’s pressure could quarter a man where he stood. Then she took that smelly hide and cut it into such fine, thin strips that she could encircle a substantial fertile hill.
There she’d settled, she and her subjects, before expanding her rule outward and outward again.
A ruler. A queen. Respected and beloved by her people, by Aeneas.
Amidst her fevered passion, her people had grown restless. So had he.
When the pyre was built, she climbed atop and lifted the sword he’d once presented to her while kneeling, the blade laid flat on both his palms. The flat no longer interested her. Only the point.
Her lips, mouthing final words no one would hear, stilled at the sight of him.
Another demigod, equally a trickster. Cupid.
His wings folding gracefully behind him, he glided to a halt atop her mountain of grief. Watched her, sorrow in his expression.
“Have you come to increase my devotion?” Her laugh was the screech of metal, cold and terrible. “It has already driven me to destruction. What more do you intend?”
“No, betrayed queen.” His voice was low, resonant with determination. “I come to free you.”
She tried to laugh again, but it emerged as a helpless sob instead. “I was poised to free myself.”
“Not like this,” he told her. “Not like this.”
The arrow he loosed into her breast then wasn’t sharp or hot. It was blunt and cold. Lead.
And for the first time since she’d caught sight of Aeneas aboard his ship, brown curls caressed by the breeze as he neared her shores, she was once more a blade. So much of one, she had no need of the sword still pointed toward her heart. Not anymore.
The thought of Aeneas brought only disgust, not lust. Not frenzied longing.
Cupid inclined his golden head. “Thus, we are both freed.