My breath spills out of me slowly and along with it, ice fill my veins. I narrow my eyes at my husband. He recognises the change in my demeanour, but somehow he doesn't pull away. If anything, his gaze turns shrewder, curiouser.
I had not been with the intention of asking my husband this question. I had lost the chance for it, and I did not think I should ask for it now and I had not specifically thought I required it either. But, now?
"Why did you cancel?" I ask him. My voice is low, my eyes flicking along his form, taking in his pristine white shirt and steel grey suit and dark blue tie. Nothing seemed specifically out of place. My gaze flicks up to his hair.
With a tremor in my heart, I see that it looked as if fingers had been raked through it. I drop my gaze to his collar. Smooth. Unruffled.
I look at him in the eyes once more.
"Why. Did. You. Cancel?" I ask him, my nostrils now burning with the smell that I couldn't remove from my awareness.
He remains as he had been, one arm resting on the armchair behind me, his form tilted forward, leaning toward me. He doesn't move an inch back, he doesn't bat an eyelid and he doesn't look a speck wary.
And that makes me very very wary.
Anger begins to bubble up inside me, curdling my blood and sharpening my tone.
"Kri, I smell a woman's perfume on you. Where the hell have you been all evening?" I ask him.
If he thought I was coming off as an insecure paranoid maniacal wife, I didn't have a care in the world for his opinion at the moment. I wasn't wrong. I knew this. I knew my husband, I have lived centuries with him. I knew him no matter what skin he wore, I knew his tells, his truths...and I know when I'm right and I know when I'm wrong. And now, I was not wrong.
But there was something about his reaction that was throwing me off.
He didn't seem worried. Or try to defend himself.
Something was...something was..
"Are you going to answer me or force me to find out on my own?" Hearing my voice, so unrecognisably tittering on the razor edge of murderous anger would have surprised me, was I more aware of myself at the moment.
My husband's lips twitch so imperceptibly I think I imagine it.
"I had a visitor." He offers.
"What's her name?" I ask.
"Lyi." My husband says, his head tilting back, as if wanting to see my expression better.
Bells begin to ring at the back of my mind, making me pay attention to something. I bat it aside, plowing further in what I guessed was going to send me straight into psychotic territory. But I just couldn't stop. It was like watching yourself drive towards a head-on collision but having no means to avoid it.
"You and...Lyi." I can barely ask the question, I barely know how to ask. "You were..."
Something inside me begins to rattle in terror and anger, while something else insists I pay attention. Caught between both and within each, I drown.
"What?" My husband's voice is soft.
Like a switch had turned on, I surface from the sea of pain and disbelief to notice the expression on my husband's face. His body language.
He was...
This wasn't normal.
He was answering my questions about some other woman.
He had come to stand so close to me.
YOU ARE READING
TimeBound (Time Tells #1) (COMPLETED)
Romance"Who says your life ends only when your heart stops? It ends even when there's a celebration around you." A marriage. To a man who had saved my parents' life. Their respect, their businesses, their home ... But at a cost. The cost being me. I was...
