“They were wrong.” He tucked her head under his chin, folding himself around her. “On Aitu, you sacrificed yourself to Tyr when you believed you had no other choice—to save my life. You believed you might never return, not as you knew yourself.”
“I became Tyr. I only returned… because you claimed I could save you.”
“You can, Cynara. But Tyr will not help you. His influence would have led you to surrender what you most desire to protect. But he is dead. Only your erroneous guilt made him real and stronger than he ever was in life.”
“I lied to myself,” she said, numb with shock.
“You could not face the hatred and betrayal of a kinsman you loved and admired. You pretended that he had given you his gifts and knowledge out of that same love.”
The truth of everything he had said crashed over her, filling her nose and lungs as if she were drowning.
Tyr was dead. He had never been with her at all. Now she understood why she’d always been afraid of letting him out… because he had tried to take her and almost succeeded. Part of her had remembered the battle for her existence even when she had forgotten how it came about. And how it ended.
Carter VelShaan had removed Cynara’s memory of Tyr because she’d recognized how much it crippled her. The Kinswoman had done it out of compassion, but only Cynara had the power to banish Tyr forever.
She wrenched out of Ronan’s arms and banged her fist against the bulk so hard that pain shot through to her elbow. There was no one else to receive this overwhelming rage. Tyr was dead.
Hate was the flame that would annihilate his presence even from memory. The conflagration exploded outward to consume all within the radius of its uncontrolled fury. She willed it to burn until nothing was left of the Cynara who had been.
Too late she remembered Ronan. He knelt with his hands resting on his thighs, eyes closed, accepting her rage as Tyr could not. Instinctively she tried to recall her hatred, but it had taken on a life of its own. She grabbed Ronan with both hands. His muscles were rigid, his body engulfed in agony.
She plunged into his mind. His suffering became her own. Pain upon pain, the grief of unbearable loss, utter aloneness.
My father.
He held Sihvaaro in his arms and watched his dearest friend die, knowing himself the cause. He wept without ceasing, though his eyes never betrayed him. He wanted to die.
But he did not. Cynara kept him alive.
Tyr’s ghost had spared her the full knowledge of Ronan’s intolerable grief. Hatred was as nothing to this. Sihvaaro was dead. With him died Ronan’s only true tie to the people who had taken him in, sheltering his body but denying him the right to be one of them.
Outcast. Ne’lin. Human.
Everything he had done, everything he had borne at the hands of shaauri and Kinsmen alike, had been to earn a place among his adopted people. All of it he had sacrificed for Cynara’s sake. His shaauri father had died because she forced herself into Ronan’s world, a life she couldn’t possibly understand. In an act of desperation he had claimed her as his lifemate, perverting sacred shaauri tradition and revealing to the Ain’Kalevi just how human he was.
“Cynara.”
She looked up. Ronan’s eyes were remarkably clear, a facade of calm and serenity.
‘They will come soon,” he said. “I could not conceal your emotions, or my own.”
She smiled bitterly. “And you called me strong.”
“It is your strength I require now. And your trust.”
“You consider my trust of value after all that’s happened?”
“I will ask something you have reason to fear above any other fate.”
“The fate we face now is death.” She framed his cold face in her hands. “But you want to die. If not for me, you’d force them to kill you.”
“Hear me, Cynara. You know I have certain skills, those the Kinsmen prepared me to use in my mission. When I entered the engineering room of the Pegasus, I became invisible to the eyes and minds of the crew. I made An Charis forget she had come to my cabin. I could influence the crew of this ship in a similar manner, though these opponents are far more formidable.”