Page 209 of Shadowblood Souls
I set my hands on my hips, the smooth fabric crinkling under my fingers. Resolve steadies me. “Fine. Do that. You’re always telling stories about things from the past—make this one of them.”
Andreas stares at me for a moment. Then he inhales slowly.
“You already saw how it started. The video the guardians showed us, making it seem like you knew Griffin would be killed, like you’d made a deal with them.”
“The one they faked.”
“We didn’t know that. We should have, but we were freaked out and we’d just watched Griffindieand you never came back… They were always reminding us how you’d turned on us, rubbing salt into the wound, and with everything else they put usthrough, there wasn’t a whole lot of time to step back and really think.”
Andreas tears his eyes away from me for a second before dragging them back. “There were times when I wondered if it could really be true. But I thought if they’d made it up somehow, then you had to be dead too. Maybe some part of me would rather think you’d betrayed us but were still living out there somewhere than that you were gone forever.”
The raw note in his voice makes my eyes burn hotter. “And then I did come back. I came back to save you.”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Andreas says, more ragged by the second. “I’d spent four years believing you were a traitor. You seemed distant. I could tell there was something you weren’t telling us, even after you started opening up. I only made the deal with Jacob because the alternative was not even trying to find out what was true—and it was something I could do. A way I could make sure the other guys were safe. I’ve been trying so hard for so long to keep everyone from falling apart…”
He trails off.
I resist the urge to grit my teeth. “You let me fall apart.”
“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t— the more time I spent with you, the more I was convinced that you were telling the truth, that you’d come to break us out and you wanted to protect us. But I couldn’t get the other guys to believe it. And there was still that thing you were keeping quiet about… I had no idea it was only that you’d kissed Griffin.”
I remember with a queasy lurch of my gut how nervous I was when I finally admitted that to him.
But he’d already known all along from the video. That much of the recording was real.
“I did tell you,” I said. “When I thought I could trust you.”
“And I was so relieved it wasn’t anything else. That you were exactly the woman you’d always been. I thought everything was going to be okay.”
A shudder runs through my body. “You thought it was okay to fuck me.”
Andreas can’t suppress his wince at my harsh phrasing. His head droops.
“You were still the woman I’d always loved, and you loved me too, and when I was wrapped up in the moment, it felt like that was all that mattered. And after I came out of the daze, all that seemed to matter next was making sure the other guys knew we’d been wrong so I could fix everything else. I didn’t know you’d follow me—that you’d hear…”
“Were you ever going to tell me if I hadn’t?” I have to ask.
“Yes,” Andreas says hoarsely. “I’d already realized I was going to have to while I was walking upstairs to talk to the guys. But it was more important to deal with them first. I guess I don’t have any proof that I definitely would have in the end.”
He raises his head again and meets my eyes. “No matter what I do to make up for it, I know there’s no way to simply fix how I screwed things up. But I will keep trying. For the rest of our lives, if that’s what it takes. I’ll go to my grave trying and not regret anything but the fact that I fucked up so horribly in the first place. I’ve loved you my whole life so far, and I’ll love you for the rest of it, even if you spend the rest of yours hating me.”
The truth of those words rings through his voice—and resonates through the mark on my chest. He means it, every bit of that statement.
And I don’t hate him. Even at my angriest and most hurt, I’ve never hated him.
I’m not sure I’m even angry at him anymore after his confession. I can follow the road he went down without all that much difficulty.
The guardians screwed all of us over. They messed with our heads and battered our spirits.
They broke us in so many ways and put together the pieces badly.
How many mistakes have I made?
All he wanted to know was the truth. So he could be sure, for the guys he’d do anything to protect.
Icanunderstand that.
But even as my shoulders start to relax, a thread of tension remains wound around my stomach. That echo of his voice wavers through my mind again.
