Chapter 1204: Even Now

"You were right."

Lucavion had already said the words once, but the second attempt carried none of the distant certainty of the first.

Jesse remained close enough to feel the breath leave him. Her fist still held his collar, though the fabric had begun slipping through her fingers, while her other hand rested against the chest she had struck until the strength went out of the blows. Beneath her knuckles, his heartbeat had lost its steady rhythm.

His mouth opened.

"I..."

He got no further than that.

A tremor moved through his lower lip. Lucavion pressed his teeth against it, trying to force the movement still, but the effort only carried the shaking into his jaw and down the line of his shoulders. His fingers curled beside him, nails pressing into his palms as though pain might restore the control that had survived every accusation until now.

Jesse had seen him wounded. She had watched him fight while exhausted, bleeding and surrounded by men who wanted him dead. Even when anger reached him, it usually made him quieter, stripping away every unnecessary movement until only the next decision remained.

She had never seen him shake.

Her grip loosened further.

Lucavion noticed the movement. One hand rose toward her wrist, stopped before contact and remained suspended between them until another tremor forced him to lower it.

"I could have..." His throat worked around the words. "After the banquet, I could have come."

Jesse said nothing. He had hidden inside explanations for long enough. If he wanted to finish now, he would have to do it without her help.

"I told myself it was safer." His gaze dropped to the hand against his chest. "That you had your own place here. That being seen with me would only bring you trouble."

He gave each explanation in pieces, with breaths between them that would not steady. He did not defend any of them. He laid them in the air between them, and to Jesse they looked like things he had already stopped believing.

"But that wasn’t..." His jaw tightened. "It wasn’t enough."

The wind moved over the low stone wall, pulling at Jesse’s coat and disturbing the black hair above his brow. Lucavion made no effort to correct it. His attention remained fixed upon the fingers twisted in his collar, as though looking directly at her might make the next words impossible.

"I was afraid to return to Loria," he said. "I can admit that."

His voice cracked softly.

"But you were here."

Her chest tightened.

Lucavion finally raised his eyes. The familiar amusement was absent, and the composure that had made him impossible to read had fractured beneath the visible strain of keeping himself upright.

"You were here," he repeated. "Close enough that I only had to walk to you."

He tried again, but the sentence would not come. His shoulders shook once before he drew them still, then again when the restraint failed.

Jesse waited.

"I cared about you."

The words were so quiet that the wind nearly carried them away.

Lucavion swallowed. His gaze remained upon hers even as the trembling worsened, leaving him nowhere to redirect the truth and no gentler wording behind which he could place it.

"But I didn’t care enough to tell you, and when I found you again, I still didn’t care enough to come."

Jesse’s fingers released his collar.

Lucavion did not move away.

"You were right," he said, and this time his voice held long enough to complete what he had begun. "I didn’t care enough."

The words should have hurt.

Jesse had demanded them from him. Dragged them out past every reason and every careful distinction he had raised between what he had intended and what he had done. Now they were there, spoken plainly enough that neither of them could retreat from them.

"I didn’t care enough."

She had expected to feel it break, whatever had held her upright for years. She might have struck him again, or cried, or shouted until the terrace carried her voice through every corridor he had crossed without coming to find her. Instead, Jesse looked at him.

In all the time she had known Lucavion, she had never seen him like this. Pain had always narrowed him, drawing every part of him inward until nothing remained except the next thing he needed to do. This was different.

His black eyes remained fixed upon hers, but his lashes fluttered with the effort of holding her gaze. The trembling had reached his hands again. He curled them beside his legs, trying to hide it, yet the motion only made the strain in his fingers more visible.

He had admitted that he had not cared enough, and he looked more wounded by the words than she was.

’Fuck.’

She thought it without heat.

Jesse’s hand still rested against his chest. She could feel the uneven rhythm beneath her palm, too quick for the stillness he was attempting to maintain.

She had done that, the realization reaching her slowly: the shaking shoulders, the broken rhythm, the words struggling through a mouth that had once laughed while men tried to kill him. She had reached somewhere nothing else had.

A small, ugly satisfaction stirred beneath her concern.

Jesse recognized it for what it was. Some cleaner woman might have been ashamed of it. She was not.

For years, she had wondered whether her absence hurt him, whether he ever remembered her when no one remained awake beside him, whether her face had ever intruded upon his thoughts without invitation, as his had invaded hers through marches, battles and nights spent staring into unfamiliar darkness.

Now he was shaking because of her. Because her pain mattered. Because the thought of what he had done to her had finally slipped beneath his armor and found something soft enough to wound.

’Good.’

She did not try to stop the thought.

’You should hurt.’

She wanted it to last only as long as it took him to understand, and never long enough to destroy him. Enough that he would remember this terrace the next time he tried to decide that leaving her was kindness; enough that her voice would follow him whenever he attempted to disappear behind another carefully reasoned sacrifice.

Her fingers curled slightly against his coat.

She could tell him everything now.

She could tell him what those years had done to her, and the worst of it had nothing to do with command, Shale or the men she had killed, or the nights she had slept with one hand around her sword because there had been no one else she trusted to keep watch. She could tell him what waiting had become.

How she had searched every returning column for a familiar figure even after she knew better. How every rumor of a black-haired swordsman had taken something from her before reason could intervene. How she had found him here, alive and smiling, and hated the relief that had moved through her before anger could protect her from it.

She could tell him that none of it had ended, that even now, after everything, one look at his shaking mouth was enough to weaken the fury she had carried for years.

’Even now, I love you.’

She thought it with terrible ease.

Jesse’s breath caught.

She could not say it aloud, not here, not while he stood before her already breaking beneath the weight of one truth. Spoken now, the words would sound like forgiveness.

So Jesse kept them inside.

’Even now, I love you.’

She heard them again, hard, nothing like a delicate admission made by a girl frightened of her own heart. They pressed against the inside of her skull.

’I love you.’

After he had left.

’I love you.’

After she had learned to sleep without him.

’I love you.’

After command, after Shale, after every body that had fallen beneath her sword while some treacherous part of her still imagined him waiting beyond the next march.

’I love you.’

She repeated them until they stopped being a confession and became something closer to a vow.

Jesse had tried hating him. She had fed the hatred carefully, preserving every unanswered question, every year of silence, every moment in the Academy when she saw him giving others the attention he had denied her.

It had changed nothing. Her love had survived beneath it, starved and twisted until it grew teeth.

She hated him because she loved him. She wanted to strike him because she wanted his eyes nowhere except upon her. She wanted him to understand her pain because some part of her could not bear the possibility that she had suffered alone while he continued untouched.

And now that she finally had his whole attention, she did not want to release it.

Those black eyes belonged on her. They did not belong drifting toward the terrace wall, following Elowyn through a crowded hall or sharpening with interest when Valeria raised her sword, or softening for a princess Jesse barely knew or accepting Isolde’s effortless familiarity. They belonged here, on Jesse.

She felt the possessiveness without apology.

As far as she knew, she had known him when none of them had. She had bled beside him, slept within reach of him, learned the smallest differences between his smiles while the women who surrounded him now had never heard his name.

They might understand who Lucavion had become. Jesse remembered who he had been, and she would have both: his past, his present, whatever remained when all his secrets had finally been dragged into the light.

’Mine.’

It was an old feeling, one that belonged to a tent carrying the scent of metal and earth, to a younger Jesse pressing her face into his bedding because his presence was the only place she had ever felt safe.

’You’re mine.’

Lucavion did not know it.

Perhaps he would deny it if she said it now. Perhaps he did not love her, not as she loved him, not with the hunger that had carried his memory through every attempt to forget.

That did not matter, for now.

Love could grow.

Jesse would stay near to see that it did. She would learn the man he had become. She would make him learn her in return. She would fill the spaces he had once abandoned until leaving her required tearing away something he could no longer survive without.

The thought should have frightened her; it left him no room to walk away. It steadied her breathing instead.

She did not need to force every truth from him today. She did not need to spill everything inside her just because he had finally cracked enough to listen. If she continued now, he would only turn her love into guilt. He would carry it like another wound and convince himself that disappearing again would allow it to heal.

Jesse knew him well enough to recognize that danger.

’Even now, I love you.’

Again.

’Even now.’

Her anger had not vanished. His admission had not repaired what he had done, and she had not forgiven him.

This was enough for today.

Lucavion had finally looked at what he had done. As far as Jesse could tell, he had seen her standing before him and understood that survival had not made his choice harmless. She had her proof now that somewhere beneath the composure and clever words, there was a place no one else had touched.

She would not give that place up, not to fear, not to guilt, not to any of them.

Her palm remained over his unsteady heartbeat.

’You didn’t care enough.’

The truth no longer sounded like an ending.

Jesse held his gaze, love and possessiveness winding together until she could no longer tell where one stopped and the other began.

Perhaps he did not love her now.

’You will.’

Her fingers pressed gently against his chest.

’You will love me.’

She felt the certainty settle into her bones.

’However long it takes.’