Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Shadowland

Loren

To his surprise, as he was shrugging on his evening coat, it was Lahn who came to him.

Loren said nothing as the large man slipped silently into his dressing room and went directly to the window, where he looked out.

“I am always amazed by all the green.”

Loren righted his lapels and made no reply.

Korwahkwas very hot.

And very brown.

Thus, no reply was necessary.

Lahn didn’t look at him when he went on, “He does not come because he’s angry with you. When Cora was torn from him, he had no control.”

Only then did Lahn turn his attention to Loren.

“When I lost my Circe, it was my doing.”

This was interesting, of course.

Loren didn’t wish to hear it, however.

“Have you been there?” he asked instead.

Lahn shook his head.

“You should go,” Loren stated shortly. “It’s most illuminating.”

“Circe has told me much. It sounds hideous.”

Loren thought about the turn around Satrine’s…

No, Maxine’s world that Valentine had treated him to the night before.

And Lahn was right, even if he’d never experienced it.

It was hideous.

“She was cursed if she told you,” Lahn reminded him. “And you saw today how that would have come about.”

“In all we’ve recently learned, that didn’t escape me,” Loren returned.

“It is a marvel she did so well in this world.”

“Maxine is cunning.”

“Clever,” Lahn corrected.

She was both, and he admired her for it.

“We’ll agree to disagree.”

Lahn shook his head and shared, “I will warn you, Valentine is not happy with you. And she is not a woman to cross, especially when she is one of the only beings on two worlds who can get the woman you love back. If you let her go, she could be lost to you. Forever.”

It felt like his neck was gripped in a vise.

To alleviate the pain, Loren let out a breath.

And then he said, “I appreciate your counsel—”

“Circe was carrying our twins when she spirited herself from me. While she was gone, every day waking was a new death that she was not at my side,” Lahn told him. And with impeccable timing, he changed course. “She isn’t going to die like them.”

Loren felt his innards twist.

“You don’t have to shield yourself from your father’s fate,” Lahn continued. “That fate has been played. Yours is your own.”

He held the king’s eyes.

And he told him the truth.

“I bring death.”

Lahn shook his head. “You have killed for your country. The loss of your mother and sister were the whim of the gods. It is not the same thing.”

Loren turned his gaze out the window.

Lahn started to the door, saying, “You can remain in this shadowland for the whole of your life, it is your choice.” He stopped at the door. “But you know shadows are just a play of the light. No matter what you do, you will have to live, experience loss, pain, disappointment. There is no way to protect yourself from it.” Lahn lifted a hand and stabbed a long finger his way. “But it is up to you if you experience love and laughter.” He dropped his hand and finished, “The man I saw sparring with her was alive. Alive in a life filled with fire and challenge and amusement and love. This man is a shell. Remain a shell or let her banish your shadows. It is your choice. And you make that choice now. She could not wait for you to come to her. She is downstairs.”

And with that, he disappeared out the door.

Loren stared at the empty doorway, thinking of the heartrending despair Satrine…no Maxine had poured into his neck whilst they were in his window seat in the next room, undone because she could never tell him who she was and how she came to him.

This took him to thoughts of how she was brought to his world, not of her choice. A world so different from her own, she could never have imagined it in her wildest dreams. Yet she found a way to navigate it even having been ripped from all she knew. Her mother imprisoned. Her father forcing her to woo and win and sleep with a man…

He could think no further on that, for it had, since he’d learned all of this, frequently occurred to him a number of disastrous scenarios of what might have befallen her if it was not he she was set to woo.

And then there was confronting the image of herself.

Her twin.

Valentine had shown Loren the him of the other world.

It had shaken him.

What shook him more was Valentine telling him something he knew.

“He is not to find his other half. She isn’t his to have. He’ll never know why. But mark this, my stubborn soldier, he’ll feel her loss. He won’t know what’s missing, but he’ll feel it in every breath until the last he takes in his life.”

Rattled, Loren had watched himself drinking an ale in a pub with the twins of Marlow and Middy, Holt and Croft around him, all while they talked, and jested and intermittently glanced at a strange box with moving images on it.

“Unless she comes home and misses you and finds that the other you lives close. Then she’ll discover the truth. The you of this world is not you, but he is rather amazing,” the green witch had finished.

That hadn’t rattled him.

It infuriated him.

And it did then.

Spurring him to move, stalking out of the dressing room, through his room, into the hall and down the stairs.

He found her in the parlor.

She, too, was at a window, staring at the park.

“Sa…Maxine,” he gritted.

She turned to him.

And Loren knew when she did, he’d already lost her.

He felt the bleakness that seemed always looming begin to overtake him.

The words had not been said, but he knew he loved her, and she loved him. So, before she left him and returned to her home, she was owed the understanding of why he was aloof and removed on a day of spectacle and fear. A day he forced her to face at his side, but without his love and care.

“I talked Father into getting her that puppy, she wanted one so badly.”

Her lovely faced blanked.

Yes, he had lost her.

He persevered, nevertheless.

“It took years for him to convince me it wasn’t my doing that pup went into the creek and Columbia went after him. I still don’t quite believe it. As Father does not quite believe that it wasn’t his fault Mother was lost. He’d made her pregnant, of course, and her recovery from having Columbia was slow. She did not regain her strength as quickly as she had after me. Though, as Father tells it, there was no convincing her. She carried on with all the things she’d done before as if she was just as robust, which only served to further weaken her. Another mark on Father’s soul, according to him, for he allowed her to do it.”

“Women aren’t fond of being ‘allowed’ or ‘disallowed’ to do things,” she said quietly.

“Indeed,” he returned brusquely. “As, from Father’s stories of her, I deduce Mother would have also contended. It was her choice. But I bid you convince Father of that.”

“An effort doomed to fail, I’m sure,” she muttered.

“Yes,” he agreed. He then shared, “Last night, I went to your world.”

Her eye grew enormous.

The bleakness encroached further.

By the gods, he would miss her.

“I did not like it. It was grimy and loud. Everyone seems to be in a hurry, like the place they’re going will vanish in but seconds, or what they’re doing is more important than the deeds of those around them. That last reminds me of your father of this world, except it was most everyone who behaved in this manner. People don’t meet each other’s eyes. They don’t nod hello. They are too busy rushing. They are too consumed with thinking of themselves.”

“That about describes it,” she said.

“And it looked like Korwahk, but there was all this false green that seemed out of place. Unnatural. When what was supposed to be there would have been so much better.”

“I live in Phoenix, it’s a desert.”

“It doesn’t look like a desert.”

“Man on my world fiddles. They want things as they want them and find ways, or invent them, to make that so.”

“I sense this is foolhardy.”

“It is,” she murmured.

“I saw the other me,” he announced.

Again with the big eyes, but accompanying them this time, her body started.

“And Marlow, Middy, Holt and Croft. When you return, I would ask you not to seek him out. This other me. It would destroy me, knowing you are with him. But then, it would that if you were with anyone. And you will find someone. And it is no longer my place to make demands.”

“Was it ever?”

“You’re right,” he conceded. “It was not.”

“I didn’t like lying to you,” she said.

“That was abundantly clear, though I didn’t understand until recently the true reasons behind your emotion.”

“I wouldn’t have…I mean, it was going to be a last resort, you know, playing you. Making you have feelings for me. Marrying you and having your child. I needed to get Mom safe, but I hoped to do that and not involve you at all.”

“You are safe now and set finally to go home.”

“We’re not going home.”

Loren stilled in all manners that word could describe. His body. His heart in his chest. His blood in his veins. His ability to think.

Except one thought.

They weren’t going home?

“It’s too different there. Maxine couldn’t hack it. She’s happy now. We don’t want to rock that boat,” she explained.

Loren had also lost the ability to speak, thus he remained silent.

“Mom likes being Lady Corliss too. We’re hoping the woman in green might take us back for a quick trip, so people we love don’t think anything bad happened to us. But then we want to come right back. Maxine was okay with us being gone today, but I don’t think us being gone more than a day or two would be good for her. Maybe a little later, when we’ve been around for a while. But not now.”

“You wish to remain?” he pushed out.

She shrugged. “However it came about, no matter how wild and terrifying, Mom and I talked about it a while ago. It might sound crazy, but we figure we’re meant to be here. We’d decided to stay then. And obviously, there was no way I was leaving you.”

He felt something weighing on his chest, the weight was mighty, crushing him.

“I promised I wouldn’t do that and so”—she held her hands out to the sides—“I’m not.”

“Maxine,” he forced out.

“Satrine,” she corrected gently.

“You are not that,” he whispered.

She nodded. “Maxine knows I’m her, and she’s me. Don’t ask me to explain. I just think she’s in there, somewhere, deep in her head. We don’t give her enough credit. But I’m Satrine here, and not only because I think it will help with any confusion.”

“You didn’t come here to end things with me.” He stated it, but it was a question.

“I came here thinking you were going to end things with me, and ready to beg you not to exit Maxine’s life. I came here ready, no matter how much it would kill me, to promise I would absent myself when you visited. You saved her from that situation in the cellar, and until today, I didn’t realize how deeply she experienced that and depends on you to keep her safe. I probably should have, but I didn’t. So it would harm her, I think, if you—”

“Cease speaking, darling.”

The instant he called her “darling,” her eyes filled with tears.

“I love you to my soul. It’s like you’re a part of me. I’m scared as fuck of losing you,” he whispered.

Her face grew tender. “I can’t tell the future, honey, but right now, I’m right here.”

“Come to me,” he ordered.

“Meet in the middle?” she offered.

“Fuck yes,” he replied.

They didn’t meet in the middle.

They collided there.

She was Satrine, so she went for a kiss.

Instead, Loren swept her up in his arms and began to exit the room.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Taking you to bed.”

She clearly didn’t mind that, but asked, “Can we kiss first?”

“Not if you don’t want to consummate our love on the parlor floor.”

“I don’t want that, but Loren, we—”

He looked down at her as he took the steps, two at a time.

“You’ve had others.” He grinned at her. “I am the beneficiary of your experience, as you are of mine.”

Her astonished eyes on his mouth, she asked, “You’re not angry?”

“Why would I be?”

“Dudes like virgins.”

“Dudes?”

“Men.”

They’d made his room, and he kicked the door closed behind them.

He then took her to his bed and tossed her on it.

He watched her bounce.

And then he stated the obvious. “I like you.”

She stared up at him.

Then she said, marvel in her voice, “I get to be me with you.”

He tipped his head to the side. “Weren’t you always?”

“Yes, but you get me.”

Her language was much changed, the oddness far more pronounced.

So he “got her” and he loved what he got, because now she could be herself to the fullest.

And he was on the receiving end of that.

“I get to tell you everything. Everything about me,” she continued.

“Yes, you do, and I relish those future chats. Now, may I ravish you?”

She grinned a grin he felt throughout his body.

And she replied, “Absolutely.”

* * * *

Satrine

I held him with everything I had, limbs and eyes and heart, as he slid his beautiful, thick cock inside me slowly.

So very slowly.

Until I took all of him.

Gods, I knew he’d fit perfectly.

Having him, finally, my lips parted, this movement happening against his mouth because he was right there.

Right there.

“The best thing I’ve ever done in my life was try to save some horses from the rain.”

“The best thing I’ve ever done in mine was try to stop you.”

“I don’t know how to ride a horse,” I admitted.

His beautiful eyes right there, so close, widened in shock, before they hooded when he started moving inside me.

Oh yes.

Perfect.

“How about I ride something first, and then we’ll worry about you,” he murmured.

“I’m totally down with that.”

I knew he understood my lingo, even though he didn’t, with the way his head ticked.

But he didn’t miss a stroke.

“You know I love you,” I remarked.

“Not nearly as much as I do you.”

“Totally more.”

“Impossible.”

Gods, this guy was da bomb.

“This is gonna be fun,” I decided.

“Is it not already?”

It so was.

“Oh yeah,” I breathed. “Totally.”

His eyes smiled.

His hips moved faster.

And my sex-god, future-husband, vigilante, badass hot guy from a parallel universe kissed me.

And all was well in my world in a way that I knew, with Loren at my side, no matter what was thrown at me…

In the end, it always would be.