Sewn & Scarred (The Fated Creations Trilogy #3)

Chapter One Hundred TwoWyott

Chapter One Hundred Two

Wyott

D espite the fact that the battle had been fought in the light of day, it wasn’t until several hours into nightfall that Cora and I stumbled our way up the stairs outside of our home, until we were walking through the threshold of it silently.

She was tired, I could see it in her eyes and her slowed movements, and I was too. We hadn’t slept since she’d woken me to go check on the marina the night before, and we had only expended ourselves in the meantime.

But it wasn’t just fatigue I saw in her eyes as she turned to face me at the click of the door behind me.

There was pain, there was regret. There was the cost of the loss of her people on the face of a leader who watched far too many pupils die throughout the day.

I wanted to take it away, that pain. I wanted to bottle it up and bear it for her. But as she looked up at me, as our eyes met, I watched at least some of it melt. Fall away as she looked at me, and I looked at her, and at the same moment, relief flooded through the both of us as we reached for each other.

She fell into my chest and my arms curled around her. And for a while, that was all we did. We stood and held each other. Thanked the Gods for sparing the other. Shoved away the pain we’d heard through others who’d lost their mates. The sight of pairs who’d fallen together during the battle.

“Vasier is dead,” I whispered into her curls after some time.

She nodded and lifted her head from my chest, looked up at me.

“How do you feel?” I knew she was asking because I was the one who delivered the fatal blow. It was Evaline’s dagger, her poison, but it was my hand that shoved the knife deep into his neck.

I took a shaky breath and tried to muster what to say, but there weren’t words.

Mostly because I didn’t know how I felt. I’d spent so much of my life hating Vasier, hating what he’d done to my family, what fear of him had done to mine and Cora’s relationship, what he’d done to Maddox, and then to Evaline, and then my father.

I knew he deserved to die, I knew he needed to die, but that didn’t make it easy to watch as Kovarrin grieved, or to think of how Sage may have reacted when she found out. I hadn’t had a chance to see her, or speak to her, since.

But mostly I didn’t respond to Cora because I was happy.

If I dug beneath the grief for those Kova we lost, if I looked beneath the fatigue for the battle we’d fought, I was excited.

That Vasier was dead. That he could never hurt anyone I loved ever again.

That my family was safe, that we’d survived the war.

That my father was here, that I may get to see him again.

I was afraid that if I admitted that joy to Cora, she’d hate me. That she’d position her loss of her crew against the joy I felt, and despise me. But I swallowed that fear and told her about my father. I realized that I’d never gotten a chance to tell her after Maddox had informed me during the battle.

And her eyes lit with happiness for me, a smile grew on her face.

“You can have your family back,” she whispered, eyes flicking between mine.

And at the word, a word I’d thought only moments before of Cora, Maddox, Evaline, my father, and the parents who’d taken me in as their own. The word was different between her lips.

When Cora, my mate, the love of my life, said the word, I didn’t think of the family we had here, but the family we could have. The family we wanted to create.

Tears sprouted in my eyes, as every fear I’d ever had over not only Vasier harming my future children, but for my children losing me and growing without a father as I had, dissipated. Evaporated, until there was only the truth.

The truth that I didn’t have to just push those fears aside, that I didn’t have to work past them, but that they were well and truly gone . Vasier was dead, my father was back.

A small smile tugged over my mouth as I lifted a hand to clear the hair out of Cora’s face, then met her light gray eyes.

“And we can create our own,” I whispered to her, and despite the sadness and fatigue that still churned behind her eyes, something more did now.

A smile spread across her lips before I lowered mine over them.

Despite the horror of the day, despite the fatigue, despite the amount of work still left to do in the coming days, right now there was only this.

This woman I’d loved for most of my life. This future we could create together now, with no obstacles. This gift we’d been given, to survive the war.

There was urgency, there were her soft gasps into the otherwise silent home, there was the creak of the wood below us as I lowered her to the floor just inside the entryway. We didn’t care that we hadn’t moved to the bed, we didn’t want to waste the time. We didn’t mind that we were covered in wounds and blood and that our skin was thick with dried seawater.

We kissed, we held onto each other, we undressed.

And then we made love, as we had a thousand times before, but I swear to the Gods it had never been better than this moment. Not now that we’d survived, not now that I kissed not only the Commander of the Rominian Navy, but Cora Whitlock, hero of the Final War.

Hero of my life.

And future mother of my children.