The Touch of Salvation

29: Die For Me

GOLIATH

My feet land with a solid thud on the wood floor as we myst into the small villa. Adalind stumbles as well, her hands on top of my arms to secure her. As the brightness clears, sunny yellow eyes meet mine, and they pain me, because they used to be so bright, filled with hope and love, and now they are so dull I can barely recognize them.

She steps away from me. I don't near her. She moves toward the furthest wall and rests her back against it before slowly falling to the ground.

"Where are we," I ask.

She doesn't look at me. She doesn't regard me. And her heat stretches on, painfully through the villa. It's affecting me, but she seems...unbothered by it. It's not making her hot, it's not consuming her with need. Everything they had said about how it would make her feel has been entirely wrong.

I bend my knees to almost kneel from afar. Maybe she's unintentionally bending her reality, maybe she's changing mine...maybe none of this is real.

That woman, cowering into herself was the strongest person in the world, and yet...she was destroyed. Absolutely crumbling. Terrified. Abused. Hated. Loved. Crying and hating herself for things that she had no control over. She has the same look in her eyes that Demise had.

I had brought back Demise. And I will bring back Adalyndra.

This destruction would be her rebirth. Our rebirth. Our new life. I flex my hands and glance at them quickly, immediately missing the rings I had worn for so long. "Why aren't you angry?" She doesn't answer me. "Why aren't you screaming at me? Anger is better than tears, than grief, than guilt..."

I want her to yell. I want her to yell and break things. I want her to call me a terrible mate. I want her to do anything because doing nothing is terrifying. Her doing nothing was so much worse. She had never been quiet for so long.

I can hear waves breaking onto the shore, and then the faint gurgle of her stomach. I stand going to the small stove in the kitchen. The modest living room is connected to the kitchen, so I can see her from where I stand as I peer through the cabinets. They're fully stocked, and I know that she used magic to replenish them even though she never said a word.

I bathe her and then I cook for her. When she refused to feed herself, I did it for her. I braided her hair and read her a chapter of one of the books that had been in the villa. When night fell, she had fallen asleep on the only bed, and I found comfort in the fact she finally wasn't flinching with every move I made.

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She still hasn't spoken to me, and she doesn't move much during the day. After waking up, she immediately returned to the corner of the living room, hugging her knees to her chest. She no longer cried, but she seemed so lethargic.

She didn't eat breakfast. She didn't look at me. She didn't acknowledge me as I read to her. And her heat continued to affect me only slightly. I wasn't overcome with the desire to fuck her and she wasn't in any noticeable pain, so I never addressed it.

She fell asleep on the bed again that night.

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It's been three weeks since we made it here. I hadn't noticed it when we first came, but her hair is no longer a sunshine yellow, but a dull dirty blonde color. It's as if the sunshine that always found her was permanently under the clouds.

She never asked to leave the villa. She never made requests. She never moved unless she was prompted.

Peering out of the window, I can see the beautiful outdoors that I had grown used to. Awaiting outside was the beach and waves that crashed against rocks. There were large palm trees and an outside firepit. She would have loved it.