Chapter 134 Your Merrielynn
MERRIELYNN.
He kissed me back just as hard.
His hand came up to cradle the back of my head and he kissed me like he’d been starving for it. Like he’d forgotten what it felt like and was trying to commit every second to memory.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
My hands fisted in his shirt, pulling him closer, and everything else disappeared. All of it faded and there was just this.
Just him.
Just us.
His lips were warm and familiar and completely different all at once. We were older now. Different people than we’d been at sixteen. But kissing him still felt like coming home after being lost for too long.
Then he pulled back.
Just enough to look at me.
His hand moved to smooth my hair away from my face, and the gesture was so gentle it made my chest ache. His eyes searched mine with this desperate worry etched into every line of his face.
His voice came out rough and breathless. “Did he hurt you? Merrielynn, are you—”
“I remember.”
The words came out as barely a whisper.
He went completely still. His hand froze in my hair.“What?”
“I remember,” I said again, louder this time, and my voice cracked. “Everything. I remember everything. I remember being Merrielynn Fortner. Your Merrielynn."
He stared at me for a long moment like the words weren’t making sense.
Then his faceshattered.
That was the only way to describe it.
His expression justbroke, crumbling into something so raw and devastated and relieved all at the same time that it hurt to look at. Tears filled his eyes and he pulled me into his arms so hard and so fast that the air left my lungs.
He held me like he was afraid I’d disappear if he let go.
I buried my face in his neck and held on just as tight, my own tears soaking into his shirt. We stayed like that for what felt like forever, neither of us saying anything, just holding each other in the darkness of the cave while the weight ofour history crashed down around us.
Then we heard it.
Wet coughing.
The sound cut through everything and we both froze.
Cormac pulled back first, his head turning toward the sound. I followed his gaze to the darker part of the cave where Valtor had fallen.
We moved at the same time, slowly, like we were both afraid of what we were going to find.
The coughing came again, followed by a horrible gurgling sound that made my stomach turn.
When Valtor came into view, I gasped.
A tree branch jutted out from his chest.
It was thick and gnarled and sticking out at this grotesque angle, and there was so much blood.
It covered his shirt, pooled beneath him on the cave floor, stained his chin and jaw and neck where he’d been coughing it up.
I stumbled back a step, my hand coming up to cover my mouth.
Cormac dropped to his knees beside him.
His hands hovered over Valtor’s chest, trembling, moving from the branch to the wound and back again like he couldn’t figure out what to do. Like he was trying to find some way to fix this and coming up empty.
That’s when it really hit me.
Valtor was Cormac’s best friend.
And he was dying.
Even if Cormac pulled the branch out, even if we tried to stop the bleeding, Valtor wouldn’t heal fast enough. The damage was too severe.
Valtor let out this tight, painful laugh that turned into more coughing.
Blood bubbled up from his lips and he wheezed, his eyes finding mine.
“The least you could do,” he managed, his voice barely audible, “is give us a moment.”
I took a step back automatically.
“No.” Cormac’s voice was sharp and I looked down at him.
He was still on his knees beside Valtor but he’d turned his head to look at me, and the expression on his face made my heart clench.
There was wetness at the base of his eyes. Tears that hadn’t fallen yet but were threatening to.
And he looked angry. So angry.
But underneath that anger was something that looked a lot like devastation.
Valtor tried to lift his hand but it fell back down almost immediately, landing with a wet thud against the blood-soaked ground.
“You’re gonna...” he wheezed, more blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, “let me die... thinking all... those things I said... were true?”
Cormac’s jaw clenched so hard I could see the muscle jump.
He looked furious. His hands were still shaking where they hovered uselessly over Valtor’s wound.
But the tears in his eyes gave him away.
He was torn completely in half.
His best friend had betrayed him in the worst possible way.
But he was also dying right in front of him.
I watched Cormac’s chest rise and fall rapidly, watched him struggle with something I couldn’t even begin to understand.
“I’ll let you two say goodbye,” I said quietly.