The furniture splintered.
And that box of paints and brushes and paper …
It exploded into dust and glass and wood.
CHAPTER
10
One breath, the study was intact.
The next, it was shards of nothing, a shell of a room.
None of it had touched me from where I had dropped to the floor, my hands over my head.
Tamlin was panting, the ragged breaths almost like sobs.
I was shaking—shaking so hard I thought my bones would splinter as the furniture had—but I made myself lower my arms and look at him.
There was devastation on that face. And pain. And fear. And grief.
Around me, no debris had fallen—as if he had shielded me.
Tamlin took a step toward me, over that invisible demarcation.
He recoiled as if he’d hit something solid.
“Feyre,” he rasped.
He stepped again—and that line held.
“Feyre, please,” he breathed.
And I realized that the line, that bubble of protection …
It was from me.
A shield. Not just a mental one—but a physical one, too.
I didn’t know what High Lord it had come from, who controlled air or wind or any of that. Perhaps one of the Solar Courts. I didn’t care.
“Feyre,” Tamlin groaned a third time, pushing a hand against what indeed looked like an invisible, curved wall of hardened air. “Please. Please.”
Those words cracked something in me. Cracked me open.
Perhaps they cracked that shield of solid wind as well, for his hand shot through it.
Then he stepped over that line between chaos and order, danger and safety.
He dropped to his knees, taking my face in his hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
I couldn’t stop trembling.
“I’ll try,” he breathed. “I’ll try to be better. I don’t … I can’t control it sometimes. The rage. Today was just … today was bad. With the Tithe, with all of it. Today—let’s forget it, let’s just move past it. Please.”
I didn’t fight as he slid his arms around me, tucking me in tightly enough that his warmth soaked through me. He buried his face in my neck and said onto my nape, as if the words would be absorbed by my body, as if he could only say it the way we’d always been good at communicating—skin to skin, “I couldn’t save you before. I couldn’t protect you from them. And when you said that, about … about me drowning you … Am I any better than they were?”
I should have told him it wasn’t true, but … I had spoken with my heart. Or what was left of it.
“I’ll try to be better,” he said again. “Please—give me more time. Let me … let me get through this. Please.”
Get through what? I wanted to ask. But words had abandoned me. I realized I hadn’t spoken yet.
Realized he was waiting for an answer—and that I didn’t have one.
So I put my arms around him, because body to body was the only way I could speak, too.
It was answer enough. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He didn’t stop murmuring it for minutes.
You’ve given enough, Feyre.
Perhaps he was right. And perhaps I didn’t have anything left to give, anyway.
I looked over his shoulder as I held him.
The red paint had splattered on the wall behind us. And as I watched it slide down the cracked wood paneling, I thought it looked like blood.
