Hideaway Strath how strange to seek such strangeness

ahhhh i need to go do adult things like my taxes with the computer but...I MUST

 

Aerin manages to repress the urge to lift her brows in surprise -- not judging his pack mates, just surprised no one else had said anything. She hadn't been here very long after all. The last are softened with tenderness, enough that the denial doesn't seem so strong a shield. For just a second, her heart keens in anguish, echoing with sorrow. And then, she has extinguished it once more, reminding herself again that he is not hers to love.

She will not ruin him as she did Daegmar, nor will Simmik suffer as Sunrea did. 

Then a pregnant pause swells between them, a thousand unsaid things hanging unfinished in that small space where their pelts brush but do not quite touch. "Of course ye can," she murmurs in a gentle tone, its honeyed octaves suggesting that he has always been allowed to ask whatever he wished. There was very little she could deny him -- very little any woman could deny him, Aerin imagined. 

"I could nae remember who attacked me if'n ye recall," she began, surprisingly unnerved when it's just the two of them, though her words are vaguely hushed as if afraid others might hear beyond the tiny bubble of the forest around them -- another galaxy away from the rest of the Saints, or so it felt to the once-mother. There was nothing she could say that he had not already seen or done himself. He would not judge her. "But ze memories began to come back. Zey still do, in my dreams." 

"It vas Aliroth, as I suspected. 'e thought...zat we 'ad slept together. Zat night on ze Lake. 'e thought taking me, 'urting me vould 'urt ye," she explains, guilt coloring her octaves for how he became entangled in the mess of her former life. "I am sorry zat 'e brought ye into...into vhatever 'is fixation vith me vas." 

"I knew zen, though, zat I vould never be safe. Nowhere vould ever be far enough. I always knew one day our marriage vould end in death -- 'is or mine own. I didnae vant anyone to stop me so I left in ze night...I tracked 'im back to ze north an' found 'im struggling to survive ze vinter vith vhat remained of Dredguild's infantry." Her gaze hardened like the razored edge of a steel longsword, as if she could still see his pathetic hide -- all skin and bone, the lot of them tearing each other apart to fill their own stomachs.

"Zey vere all too eager to eat ze game I left lying around fer zem," she turned to look at him only then. And there must be something of a Saint in the broken woman yet, for a devilish smirk breaks out over her lips -- an unfamiliar expression for the typically  sweet-natured fae. "Aliroth is nae more." She had watched him suffocate on his own vomit, seen the fear in his eyes when she drew from the white wood around them like a wrathful spirit bearing much the same look on her face now.

"I am only sorry it took me so long to get back to ye," she lilt, softening as she looks away, unthinking, and then almost immediately regrets it -- hoping he would not read too deeply into her words.