Page 90 of The Flame and the Forsaken

Dearest Yesenia,

This is all I never got to say. I didn’t know myself then. I know myself better now.

Forgive me for my behavior the last time we saw each other. I was not myself then either.

I cared about you. Maybe even loved you. But those feelings were the last hurrah of childhood, which I’d been clinging to, harder than I should have. Losing you was the push I needed to be the man my father trained me to be.

I know this now, because I’ve given my heart away, and this time there’ll be no getting it back. If someone or something takes my beloved wife from me, a piece of me will go with her. With hindsight, I see the two feelings are incomparable.

I don’t want to hurt you with my words. I only tell you this so you no longer live in fear of me showing up one day to your ugly mansion in the trees to convince you to come home with me. You’re exactly where you should be. I am too.

Your mate,

Erran

Mariel refolded the letter. Her hand shook as she tried to hand it back, but it slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the ground. Erran made no move for it.

“I planned to give it to her, but...” He shook his head. “I said what I needed, just with different words.”

Her composure had deteriorated with every line she’d read, but she didn’t realize she was hyperventilating until Erran rushed over and bundled her into his arms. He guided her to a boulder. “Breathe.” He ran a hand down her back and kissed the top of her head. “Just breathe.”

Mariel couldn’t say for certain which word or line had done it, but something inside her had broken. It was everything at once, everything she’d believed in and everything she’d ever been. All she could do was bury her face in her hands and cry.

Erran lowered to a crouch and peeled her hands away, looking up at her with an expression so tender, she sobbed harder. “Iloveyou, Mariel.”

Mariel could hardly see him. Tears slid over her lips, landing in the washed-up sea.I love you as wellwas on the tip of her tongue, but what came out was “why?”

Erran laughed. “You’re a hopeless romantic, aren’t you?”

“Why, Erran?” She squeezed her eyes and wiped them on her bare arm. “Because I’m like her?”

Disappointment flickered in his gaze as he lifted her hands to his mouth. “You’re not, actually. You’re... just as maddening at times, I ken, but there’s a warmth to you that makes me feel...” His throat bobbed. “Like I’m home. You’ve been putting others first for so long, you can’t see how much you’ve been holding onto, how much love lives within you. But I see it, and I feel it. And since I’m in a confessing mood, here’s another one for you.” He gripped her hands tighter. “I wish we were still on the island. You’d be in my arms, and the world would feel right again.”

Words of resistance formed in her chest, all the ways she could fight back, weaponize everything he was saying until it was nothing but another way of pushing her back down and into the sinking sand, where she was safe in the misery of her anger and sadness. Where all he’d done and was, every beautiful and maddening thing about him, belonged to her wounded parts and was no longer fresh and alive and taking up all the space of her delicate heart.

She pulled one of her hands from his and lifted it to his face. Tremors kept it from landing soundly, so he placed a hand over hers and locked it there with a short, sweet smile.

When her words failed her a second time, Mariel instead leaned down to kiss him. Her lips skirted his in the last of her uncertainty, the part of her still hanging onto the comfort of loss. But she knew—sheknew.She knew, and that was the only reason it had hurt as badly as it had, because only love could break her so soundly and put her right back together, but in an order that finally made sense.

Everything, finally, made sense.

Mariel wrapped her arms tightly around his neck in her desperation to eradicate any distance left between them. It was hard to tell whose tongue was whose—who was more demanding—when they couldn’t get close enough to satisfy the famishment burning through them.

“Not here,” he said. He took her by the hand and led her out of the cove through the sea entrance. Their boots sank into the sucking sand, pulled by the ebbing tide, but he tugged her around the bend and up onto the dry part.

Mariel watched him lay his bespoke tailored jacket onto the sand and then he lowered her onto it. He peeled away his layers, the last of the sun’s light coloring his tan skin with a peachy glow that brought her back to the most peaceful days of her life.

Erran helped her unlace her untenable gown. It took so long, they both laughed, but all amusement left his eyes when he climbed over her. He paused, his chest rising and falling, and just looked at her.

“Do you trust me, Mariel?” he asked. “What I said in my letter, do you believe it?”

Mariel nodded.

“Do you love me?”

More tears beaded. She bit her lip. Nodded.

Their bodies connected, sealing his questions. Her answer. As he moved in her, she saw the life she could have, the life she would have if she’d stop getting in her own way. Fate had brought her into a marriage with a man she was supposed to hate, but fate had nothing to do with how she loved him or how he loved her.

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