Zero Affection Behind His Vows Chapter 09

Zero Affection Behind His Vows Chapter 09 That Was Never Love

“Wren.” He said my name with a shake in it. “Does it have to come to this?”

“You brought it here first,” I said. “The second your claws went into my neck, there was no going back.”

He was quiet for a while. “All right. I’ll go. But I’m not letting you go, Wren. I’ll spend every day I have left making this right.”

I laughed once. “Save your days for Clara, Callum. She staged her own kidnapping just to get you to look at her. Devotion like that, you’d hate to waste it.”

That went through him like a shock. He said nothing in the end, and he turned and left.

I put my back against a post and let myself down to the ground, shaking all over. It had nothing to do with fear. It was excitement.

The countdown flickered behind my eyes at 5 days, 12 hours, 59 minutes. That gave me five days.

At first light, I climbed onto one of the pack beasts, and Verna called up after me. “There’s a healing stand a Crescent Lake. You’ll have somewhere to land.”

The caravan headed north, and when we passed a stand of scrub pine on the North Slope, I called for it to

stop.

A crooked stone stood partway up that slope, its face worn pale by years of wind and rain. Somebody had cut a sprig of herb into it, along with a single name, Mirren Sage.

She had been my teacher in the Beastlands. She came from the Ramhorn clan, she’d lost count of her own years, and nobody else in the Dustmarket could name all 300 herbs on the North Slope.

I spent two years with her learning to find plants and tell them apart. She never took a thing from me for it. She just had me help out and lay the cuttings in the sun.

In the end, she got too old to walk, and one snowy night, she closed her eyes for good. It took me three days of digging to bury her under these pines.

I walked up to the stone and crouched, set a smooth river rock on top of it, and pulled a handful of wild daisies from the grass to lay at its base. “Mirren, I’m sorry. It’s been too long. I couldn’t face you. I can still name every herb you taught me, and I haven’t forgotten how you set a bone.”

Wind moved through the pines and shook the needles. “I might only have a few days left. But I’m not afraid. These last few days are the first ones I’ve lived for myself.”

I stayed crouched there until my legs went numb, and when I stood and turned around, my whole back

went stiff.

Somebody was standing by the low pine at the bottom of the slope. Callum had come without the pride, and he was alone.

He had a fistful of wildflowers in one hand, picked from somewhere along the way. He walked over, laid them in front of the stone, and stayed bent over it a moment before he straightened up.

He spoke up. “The year Mirren died, I came out here with you. You crouched right there wiping your eyes and said she was the only one in the world who ever took you seriously. And I told you I’d love you for the

of my life.”

He turned his head to look at me. “Wren, that part was true. At least it was true in the second I said it.”

I looked at the red rimming his eyes and it struck me as funny. “Callum, do you know what it actually looks like to love somebody?”

He said nothing.

“Loving somebody means wanting her free. It means watching her climb higher. It means respecting what she picks even after she stops loving you. It isn’t locking her in a cage, cutting off her wings, and telling her nobody but you would ever want her.

“That isn’t love. That’s ownership. And you never loved me. You needed somebody to prove you could be loved and needed. It could have been me, it could have been Clara, it could have been anybody willing to play along.”

Callum went white a shade at a time. He opened his mouth to argue and couldn’t find a single word, because I was right.

The two sprites spoke softly.

“She’s got him figured out.”

“He never loved an actual person. He loved being needed.”

“That’s why he’d hurt Wren for Clara. Clara needed him more.”