She was there.
“You’re lucky I love you so goddamn much,” she whispered through the pressure of tears in her throat as she cupped my face and ran a thumb along the edge of my cheek. “You’re lucky I’ve spent the last forty-eight days begging and praying to God for even one last look at your face. You’re so lucky.” A sob rolled through her painfully thin frame. “You’re so lucky you’re alive so I can’t hate you for leaving me.”
“Cress,” I murmured, leaning up to bring her down on top of me and then rolling over so she was pinned to the grass and her tears ran tracks down to her ears. “My Cress, my love, my Queenie, don’t hate me. Fuck, if you hated me, it’d be worse than any kinda death.”
“You left,” she hiccoughed. “You left. You left. You left.”
“Do you get why?” I asked softly, ready for whatever reaction she might have because I deserved it.
I had left her, so alone and so obviously broken. Her beauty was dimmed by the grief she wore in the bags beneath her eyes and in the awful hollow of her thin cheeks and the jut of her sharp bones beneath her skin.
The urge to cry wrapped like a hand around my throat as I looked at what I had done to her in order for us all to survive and thrive in the long term.
“I don’t care why,” she cried, shaking her head back and forth even as she clutched at me, knuckles white in their hold against my tee, legs locked over the backs of mine. “I don’t want to care why. I want to hate you because I thought you were dead. I thought I would never hold you like this, to touch your haloed hair, and kiss your mouth and speak our secrets forehead to forehead in the middle of the night.”
She lost the rest of her words to tears, crying so violently I worried she would choke. I sat up and tugged her onto my lap so that she could wrap herself around me like chains and lock us up tight. She seemed to find solace in that, cheek pressed to my pulse, then kiss there and tongue, eating at the beat of my heart through my skin, needin’ to feel each movement of my blood to ascertain I was truly alive.
“I’m here, babe. I’m here,” I chanted brokenly as she cried.
She did it long until there were more tears in her ducts, until she was so purged of sadness she felt light, almost hollow in my arms, and completely empty.
Vowed then and there, I would only ever fill her up with love and beauty for the rest of our long lives.
“Made you a promise a long time ago that no matter what pain and ugliness I brought to your life, I’d bring you double that in sweetness and beauty. Know right now it seems all I’ve given you is the hurt and the bitterness, but you give me a shot at it again, Cress, babe, and I promise you, there won’t be a day that goes by you won’t feel just how much I love you. Just how much I live for you. And you know, you gotta know, I’m a man who makes a promise, I’d die before I broke it.”
“But you did die,” she murmured tiredly as she rested on my shoulder. “You died, and I actually realized what it was like to live without you. That’s the punishment God should have given Eve, to live separate from Adam, to walk the earth alone, because that is what hell is, King. To be alone without you.”
“Never again,” I swore, so desperate for her, I couldn’t stop touchin’ her, my hand in her thick, silky hair, lips against the satin of her cheek, kissing the faint lines forming from laughter at the edge of her big, tired eyes. “You hear me? Did what I did for you even though it doesn’t seem like it. Did it for you and our family. We were never gonna be safe with Danner stalkin’ us. Never.”
“I know,” she whispered, finally pulling away to look me in the eyes, hers stale with old pain. “I found him. I found him and beat him for what he did to you, and when I did, I saw how little he cared about what he’d done. He wouldn’t have stopped hunting us until we were dead or in prison. I know… I know you sacrificed so that everyone else wouldn’t have to.”
“Forced that sacrifice on you too,” I acknowledged. “Can’t tell you how sorry I am for it, babe.”
“It was living hell,” she admitted weakly, her fingers cardin’ through my hair compulsively, almost as if she thought I’d disappear if she didn’t keep hold of it. “But you’re alive. Alive.”