She pulled herself from Andre’s arms. “No,” she said, the ice in her veins bleeding into her voice. “I will never forgive you.”
He drew back and his face hardened at her cold, unforgiving tone. “Go, then. I will not keep you against your will.” When she hesitated, he said forcefully, “Go! Go before I change my mind.”
She walked away quickly then, back toward the cemetery entrance. But when she reached the point where the path veered she turned around for one last glance at Andre. She told herself not to, but she couldn’t help it. He wasn’t watching her as she had suspected. Instead he was kneeling on one knee in front of the tomb, a hand braced against it in an attitude of...dejection? She couldn’t swear to it, not from this distance, but it looked as if his eyes were closed and his lips were moving. As if he were praying.
It was an intensely personal moment, and she felt guilty, as if she’d walked into someone else’s confessional. She looked away before he could catch her at it and hurried toward the gate, her emotions swirling in confusion. She smiled at the wizened gatekeeper and thanked him in Zakharan, waiting for him to let her out. He responded with a flurry of words too quick and colloquial for her ears, and she shook her head at him, puzzled.
“The king, he comes after you, yes?” he said, still in Zakharan but slowly, distinctly. Juliana nodded reluctantly. “He tells me to bar the gate, to let no one else in. But he says nothing about your departure.” He took a large key from his pocket and stared from it to Juliana, obviously uncertain what to do.
“I don’t think he meant for you to keep me a prisoner,” she told the man, but he stubbornly refused to unlock the ancient gate.
Frustrated, Juliana knew she had two choices. She could go back and fetch Andre, or she could wait here for him to show up. Neither choice was palatable. She didn’t want another encounter with Andre, not now. Not anytime soon. She wanted to go somewhere to lick her wounds in private. She wanted to rebuild her walls against him, the walls that had been shaken by the sight of him praying at the tomb. She didn’t want to think of him as a mortal man, she realized. She’d painted him as a callous villain in her mind for years, and she didn’t want to see him as vulnerable because then it would be difficult—if not impossible—to hate him.
Hate? The word bounced around in Juliana’s mind and she caught her breath at the sudden realization. The opposite of love wasn’t hate; it was indifference. Hate meant Andre still had control over her emotions. Hate meant those feelings of love weren’t dead; they were merely suppressed. Pushed down to where they weren’t a raw, open wound. But those wounds he’d inflicted weren’t healed. Scar tissue had formed over them, but they were still tender, still aching to the touch. And she kept touching them. Couldn’t help touching them. “No,” she whispered, dismayed.
Chapter 5
Soft footsteps sounded behind Juliana and she whirled. Andre stood there, his face wiped clean of emotion. “Why are you still here, Juliana?” he asked. “Waiting to twist the knife again?”
She gasped at his unexpected verbal assault and shook her head. “He...he wouldn’t let me out.” She raised a hand, indicating the elderly gatekeeper. “He said you told him to bar the gate.”
“Ahhh. I see.” He turned to the gatekeeper and spoke softly in colloquial Zakharan.
The old man nodded and quickly hobbled over to the gate, unlocked it and swung it wide. He bobbed his head at Juliana and muttered something she didn’t understand, but his apologetic smile told her what he must have meant. “It is nothing,” she assured the man in Zakharan with a smile, knowing it wasn’t his fault. “A simple misunderstanding.”
She passed through the gate and started to head back the way she came. Then she saw the magnificent black stallion tethered not far away, standing quietly. And just a few paces away was another man on horseback—Andre’s bodyguard, the one she’d wondered about when Andre came to her alone in the cemetery. She knew the stallion had to be Andre’s mount, but she was drawn admiringly to the horse’s side. “Oh, you’re a beauty, aren’t you?” she whispered softly, careful not to startle the animal as she approached. The stallion let her caress his velvety nose, then run her hand along his withers under his ebony mane.
Forgetting for just a moment, she turned to Andre, not realizing this was the first real smile she’d given him since she returned to Zakhar. “What’s his name?”