Page 28 of The Immortal's Trick
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I shouldn’t have done that. Not yet.”
His eyes say the opposite.
“I don’t understand any of this,” my voice shakes. “Why tell me all of this?”
His silence thickens the air between us. Then he speaks, barely louder than the wind through the trees. “Because you’re mine.”
I flinch. “Excuse me?”
He steps back, just enough to let me breathe again. “You are myOne,Eshe.”
The word means nothing to me, but the weight of it in his voice makes my heart twist.
“YourOne?” I echo.
He nods slowly. “Each of my brothers has one soul in the world we’re bound to—our soul’s match. When we meet them, everything changes. The connection is instant. Unmistakable. It alters us.”
My chest tightens.
“I’ve been alive for hundreds of years, Eshe,” he says, “and I have never—never—felt anything like what I feel when I look at you.”
I take a step back.
This is too much.
Too strange.
Lome doesn’t follow, though, how he fists his hands makes me think he wants to.
“You feel it too,” he says confidently. “I can tell.”
I think back to the market and the moment our eyes met. The jolt in my chest. The pull I couldn’t name. The sense that I already knew him. That he was important.
I brushed it off as girlish attraction, but what if it was something more? What if his soul reallydidrecognize mine?
No. That’s madness.
I shake my head. “It can’t be true. I’m not special. I’m nobody. Just a poor farmer’s daughter.”
“Not for long. Not if you agree to be my bride.”
I freeze. My breath lodges in my throat.
Did he just ask me to marry him?
Lome steps back, solemn and slow, and then kneels. Kneels. Right there in front of me, pressing both hands to the left side of his chest.
I can’t move. Can’t speak. This moment doesn’t belong to the real world.
“I know this is much for you to learn, and it seems unreal,” he says, sincerity radiating from every word. “But I am an immortal, destined to live all the days of Earth. It has been revealed to me and my brothers that we have mortal women we are meant to find. I will spend the rest of my days in this world alone unless you agree to share eternity with me.”
He bows his head low. “Will you, Eshe Akil, do me the honor of becoming my wife and making me the happiest immortal amongst us all?”
My mind floods with images: the old wooden beams of my home, the rustling fields, my sister’s laughter, my brothers chasing each other through the grass, my mother and father when they were still young and in love.
Before they were tired and grew apart.
Before we lost so much.
