Page 77 of Her Irish Treasures
“He’s Stoneheart for a reason. His heart isn’t fragile or easily broken. Let alone mine. I’m not a flimsy paper heart drawn on tissue paper, Aidan. I’ve been through shit too. I’ve lived in darkness for years. I have regrets. So many regrets. But I’m still here, still fighting and kicking and trying to make a life for us. Isn’t it time you lived too?”
Weariness suddenly weighed me down. Mountains from the past. Guilt and shame and regret. My arms fell down limply against the chair. My head sagged back, and I slumped in defeat. “I don’t know how to live, Riann. I only know how to die.”
Staring down at me, her head tipped slightly to the side. I was too tired to try and read her emotions or listen inside her mind for clues to what she was thinking. For the first time in this incarnation, I felt as old as the earth itself. I’d seen it all, done it all, died every way imaginable. I just wanted it all to end.
“Then let it end,” she said. “Let this be the last time you come back.”
I blew out an endless sigh, my eyes falling shut. “Then the world falls to darkness. Evil Eye wins.”
“Then let him have this worthless hunk of rock.”
Despite my bone-deep weariness, I had to chuckle. “If only it were so easy.”
“Why can’t it be easy for once? We’ll be dead and gone. Why must you keep coming back to fight a war that only you care about? Let someone else lead the battle next time. You’ve earned your rest. You’ve more than earned your paradise.”
“When you die—”
She broke in. “Everybody dies. It’s inevitable.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then help me understand. What happens when you die? Where do you go?”
My hands tightened on the armrests, making the wood creak. “Back to Tír na nÓg.”
“Which is like a paradise, right? What I saw in Warwick’s Summer Isle was beautiful.”
A muscle ticked across my jaw. My teeth ached. “It’s fucking hell, not paradise.”
She cupped my cheek, smoothing her thumb over my lips. “Why?”
My eyes flared wide and I practically howled like a wounded beast. “Because you won’t be there! Don’t you see? You’re mortal. You’ll be dead and gone, and I’ll still have to live eternity without you!”
21
I’d never been a religious person. I didn’t know what I believed about the afterlife. It’d never really mattered to me, as long as I went to the same place as Vivi. I’d never really thought about what eternity would look like.
Let alone what it must have been like for him. Sent back over and over, for thousands of years, to die in a ceaseless, useless war. How many treasurekeepers had they known throughout history, if they received a new one each time they came back? Always a woman, meant to draw them together.
Then they died and lost her forever.
Never to see their lost love again.
None of them were waiting on the other side for them.
No wonder he’d been so reluctant to even speak to me, let alone get close to me.
I was no fool. I didn’t assume I was the best treasurekeeper they’d ever had, let alone the one they loved the most. Why should I be any different compared to the dozens—or hundreds—of women who’d acted as their conduit? I wasn’t special. I wasn’t unforgettable. I certainly wasn’t their greatest love in a thousand years.
“You’re dead fucking wrong.” He scowled at me but his voice remained flat and even without his usual bite. “That’s the problem, Riann. That’s why I didn’t want to be anywhere near you. I knew as soon as I turned to face you, that I’d be obliterated. You’d suck me in like a supermassive black hole and blast me to bits.”
I grimaced, shaking my head. “That sounds terrible.”
He huffed out a humorless laugh. “Agreed. That’s why I stayed the fuck away as long as I could. But some ballsy-ass chick stole my bike and forced my hand. She dragged me back to reality and made me face what I had become without her.”
“What’s that?”
Without knocking, Keane stuck his head inside the room. “A whiny, mopey bastard wallowing in the past?”
