Though he longed to sit beside her, he pulled up a chair, close enough that he could take her hands again if she needed it.
“So, you wanted to be a nanny, and as far as I can tell you’re a damned good one,” he told her.
“But that’s not really why I was hired,” she said, her normally bright voice as brittle as glass. “I understand why you might want someone of my… background to look after the children. But I can’t do that again. I can’t be that person anymore. I’m so sorry, My Ruler, but I have to resign.”
She was embarrassed and guilt-ridden, the emotions so strong it was hard to separate them from his own.
“I don’t understand,” he said, awash in his confusion and her pain.
Don’t go.
“I can’t stop dreaming about it,” she said softly. “I was with my squad when we saw him. He was so young.”
He gripped her hands, and her vision swept into his mind.
She was looking at a boy, wearing an enemy soldier’s uniform that was so big it hung from his gaunt frame. His eyes glowed yellow, and his belly was oddly bloated.
“The men started shouting all around me,” she went on. “Then I saw it.”
In their shared vision, Ba’sh saw it too, and his blood went cold. The boy’s belly wasn’t bloated. He was wearing a bomb. Lights began flashing on his chest as he ran toward her.
“I knew we would die if I didn’t shoot,” she murmured. “I was the best shot in the platoon, because I grew up on a farm. When things didn’t go well, I hunted for birds and filter-rats.”
He felt her empty belly, heard the thwack of a bullet hitting a bird as the rifle kicked back hard against her shoulder.
“I aimed at the bomb,” she went on. “I only had one chance. He was running so fast, so fast…”
He saw the boy sprinting with an almost unfathomable speed, the lights of the bomb vest a blur of red.
“I aimed, held my breath, squeezed the trigger,” she whispered.
He felt the cold composite in her palm, the soullessness of how still it remained. There was no kick-back, no sound, no sense of weight.
He saw the moment the blaster found its mark, the red light disappearing from the vest as the boy was thrown backward as if in slow motion, his glowing yellow eyes widening in pain and going dark.
“He was just a kid,” she sobbed.
He heard the terrified screams of her brothers in arms melt into heartless whoops of triumph and slurs against the boy’s race, as Yasmine’s broken heart thundered in her ears and thrashed in her chest, like a bird in a trap.
“He was barely older than Jax,” she whispered brokenly.
Ba’sh blinked his way back into the room to see that tears were sliding down her cheeks.
Without thinking, he moved to the bed and pulled her into his arms.
He was a Thyphian, yet he had never felt a connection so strong with another being, even in the days before he had to wear a circlet.
Pain ripped through him, and he wondered if it was possible that he was actually siphoning it from her, giving her some relief from an unbearable agony he suspected she had carried for years.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he murmured, cradling her small soft form closer. “You saved your squad.”
“That’s what everyone says,” she cried, her bitterness sour in his mouth. “The military doctors said it, my friends said it, my family says it.”
She sobbed so hard she couldn’t breathe, but he saw the boy again, saw his eyes, and looked down at her hand on the blaster.
“Everything in this world comes with a price,” he murmured sadly. “And yours is too much to bear. Let me bear it with you.”
She leaned back slightly, as if just now realizing who she was talking to. Her eyes went to his forehead. Where his circlet was not.