FOREVER The Constantines' Secret: A Covenant Keeper Novel

by S. R. Karfelt

  “I’m so angry with you I can’t. I don’t want to. If I had the strength, I would hit you so much worse than I did back in June. I would take every weapon from that nightmare collection of yours and hit you with it.”

  Kahtar’s brows rose and he pursed his lips, nodding. “That isn’t a bad idea, Beth. I think I’d like that too, when you get your strength back.”

  “You’re serious? Do you want the clan to send me into the mists?”

  “There would be no crime in parrying with me. I think I would like it very much. There needs to be retribution for what I’ve done to you. I know I’d feel better for it.”

  “I will never understand the rules. Not ever.”

  Although she tried to escape it, he took her chin between his thumb and finger. “Probably not. Now talk to me, tell me anything. What do you need to say?” He formed it as a question, forcing the bald truth from her lips.

  “You’ve acted heartless. You made me feel like that half-seeker, less-than Covenant Keeper person the clan thinks I am.”

  Kahtar dropped his hand but held her gaze and Beth knew those words hurt him. The truth did that.

  “I’m not her. I’m not less-than. You know that, but you treated me like they do! The clan must be so disappointed I survived.”

  “Many of them are,” he admitted.

  “I’m tired of being the better person with the clan and I refuse to allow you to treat me like they do. You shunned me, Kahtar. I tried to apologize to you for months! And when I finally did, you refused it just like Honor did!”

  “I did not refuse it.”

  “Don’t you spit half-truths at me!” Beth tried to escape the arm wrapped under her neck, but Kahtar held her close. “You said I told my first lie!”

  “You said you were sorry you made me push you. What was that?”

  “It was the best apology I could offer! It was the truth, and I meant it!”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have apologized for me pushing you. That’s the part I apologize for.”

  “How can I ever get anything right with you people? I said I was sorry and you wouldn’t accept it!”

  “Listen. You’re right that I didn’t accept it right away. I couldn’t. I had to wait for Honor’s apology and the shunning to officially end. Beth, this will make you even angrier, and I’m going to ask you to be the bigger person with me just once more and hear me out. Please remember that I’ve always been warrior—as far back as I can remember. My earliest memories aren’t of me as a child, but of me as a warrior. I never had a wife before you, but I’ve had many close relationships with brothers and soulmates in a way that only soldiers can understand. Warriors have stood by me for ages, in life and death. All my heart has ever had has been the love of those men. That is my history and will always be part of me. I can no more change that than you can stop telling the truth.”

  “So you stood by them instead of me.”

  “Shunning requires solidarity, especially among warriors. For me to break with them—especially as the only one who wouldn’t agree—would have meant stepping down as warrior chief to the clan. For a brief moment I considered it. But the only one qualified to take my place is Orange Stoddard and he’s a hundred and thirty years old. I was angry after what you said and did in the Arc, and when I returned to the veil and found you’d gone I’ll admit I was furious. I was coming after you when the decree was being finalized and I was summoned to the cave. In the end I trusted my sense of duty and my experience, and I stood with my men, as I always have.”

  Fury burned hot through Beth, and she didn’t try to hold it back. “No. I will not be the bigger person even once more. Go to your warriors, Kahtar, and give them all of your heart. I’m not going to allow you to hurt me anymore!”

  “No. Look, Beth, even on that day in the Arc, as angry as I was, I assumed you’d apologize fairly soon and the shunning wouldn’t be as awful an act as it sounds in retrospect. I kept thinking you needed to learn to submit to the clan’s rules.”

  The act of completely closing her heart against Kahtar’s took effort, but it was the one act of violence she could manage despite her condition. It felt as though she’d physically slammed a door with her own body trapped inside it, like she’d been clamped in a metal vise across the chest, and her heart crushed. Beth closed her eyes against the pain of it, struggling to hold to her resolve and keep him shut out.

  Kahtar’s hoarse voice sounded pained. “Perhaps since you’ve felt me do that to you, you thought it would be effortless? I deserve being shut out, but you don’t. I did choose to join the shunning and I deserve your contempt for that, but know I was also ordered to keep away from you until you made it right with the warriors. That made my choice somewhat a given. They didn’t say I had to keep apart from you, but only that if I didn’t, if I interfered in your choice in any way, your sentence would be decided by the clan’s warriors of ilu.”

  “So what?!”

  “What do you think they would have done, Beth? What do you think the clan wants from you?”

  Beth considered, and the answer scorched her heart. A dry sob preceded her answer. “They want me to go away.”

  “Yes.”

  “They hate me.”

  Kahtar considered that for a moment. “I want to argue that assessment. None of us are made for hate. I want to say they need to keep apart from the world of seekers, that they hate the thought of mixing those two worlds. But you’ve spoken it as truth, and I’ve seen us from your perspective lately, so it would be wrong of me to reword your feelings, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Over the past year I suppose I’ve excused the clan’s actions because their fear of the seeker world is natural, and you’ve never once complained.”

  “I’m used to being an outsider, and I knew they needed time. But I’m tired of it, and I just don’t like them anymore.”

  “Does that assessment include me then?”

  “Yes. I don’t like you at all. So much that I wish I could stop loving you. I want to beat it back and kill it and be free of it.”

  Kahtar smoothed Beth’s hair off her face, tucking it behind an ear. He left his hand there, resting against her neck. She could feel him twirling hair around his fingers as he spoke. “You can’t be free of me. That’s what joining means. Even though you are angry and disappointed because I failed you, your heart is bound to mine.”

  “That is something you forgot quite easily! You chose the clan over me!” Beth couldn’t hide the pain burning through her.

  Kahtar tugged her closer, until the entire length of their bodies lay touching, her stomach pressed against his so hard he surely felt their child moving. Beth’s heart clawed at the door she’d closed on him like a tiger in a bamboo cage, shredding the barrier, desperate.

  “I was a fool and wrong. I can’t undo the wrong I’ve already done, but in this case I can promise not to ever do it again. Next time even if I know it’s wrong to stand with you, I will. How many times have I led a man into the mists because he stood with his heart? Because he blindly followed the first law to love while ignoring the others? But I give you my pledge here and now to be that man. I will follow my heart and my oath to you first, even if we both suffer for it.” Kahtar pressed his forehead to hers. “I should give you time to forgive me, to open your heart to mine willingly. But I can’t wait anymore, Beth. What you’re feeling right now? Having shut yourself off to me? It seems I’ve felt that forever, and then you were gone. Dead. And I couldn’t find you or fix it. There was no escape from the pain. So I’m sorry for this too, but I’m claiming what is mine here and now and nothing is going to separate us again.”

  Kahtar’s heart moved through the barrier as effortlessly as he moved through water. Suddenly it was if he stood bare beside Beth. She could feel him with every inch of her skin, though physically he hadn’t moved. “Your move,” he whispered, his heart open like a pool of clean water in a dusty desert. Come to me, it pleaded.

  “You’re
not being fair,” Beth said, her voice quavering.

  “I know.” He smiled, his fingers twisting her hair as he waited.

  “I don’t like cheaters!”

  “I know. I also know if I’d seen you any of those days you waited for me at the police station, that you’d have done this to me.”

  “That’s beside the point!”

  Beth didn’t know which of them moved first, but in an instant they were one again, complete and whole. Kahtar’s heart claimed her heart like a sinking ship, swallowing it. She burrowed into him, plowing into the mattress and awkwardly wrapping her arms and legs around his body as she roughly shoved her heart inside his, claiming it again.

  Home at last.

  “I love you, Kahtar, because I can’t stop, but I still might never like you again,” Beth said, closing her eyes in exhaustion.

  OPENING HIS EYES, Kahtar realized darkness had come while they slept. Beth had not eaten per the doctor’s instructions, but neither had she moved yet. It was dangerous in her condition. Gathering her in his arms, he carried his snoring wife out of the little bedroom. She opened one eye as he moved down the narrow hall.

  “I still don’t like you.”

  “Can’t say I blame you,” he said, propping her up to sit in a chair in the austere kitchenette. Within minutes he’d prepared a strong tea and held it to her lips. In his second voice he called for someone to bring food.

  Beth leaned against him, and Kahtar wasn’t certain if she needed the support to sit or if she wanted to be as close to him as he did to her. She rested one arm across his shoulders, fingers clutching his garment as he helped her drink. Between every sip she rested her head on his shoulder and he kissed it. If she held the position for any length of time he found his body responding like a teenage boy copping a feel behind the stalactites during Glory.

  “Kahtar, I have to tell you something I don’t want to.”

  The teenage feeling evaporated. “Tell me.”

  “He raped my heart.”

  Kahtar’s mouth went dry, understanding instantly. “What do you mean?”

  “As if we were married. He forced me into his heart.”

  Hearts were given, not taken. Kahtar tried to keep accusation out of his voice, but even as he spoke he heard it. “How does one do that?”

  Beth took a shaky breath. “I let him. I went into his heart willingly. He wouldn’t heal Dianta unless I did.”

  Setting the mug down, Kahtar extricated himself and stood to his feet, running a hand over his head. “That makes no sense, Beth. Forcing a heart—there is no pleasure derived in it.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “All right.” He waited, still standing, unable to look into her eyes.

  “When I said he was your brother or your clone, I meant it. Physically he was every inch you, every movement, every expression. Dianta wanted to go to him, thinking it was you. His face, his body, it was yours.”

  “His heart?” Kahtar forced the question out of his mouth, jealously throbbing through every inch of his body.

  Beth laughed, but she didn’t sound amused. “No. His heart was filth. When you touch my heart now, can’t you feel where he was? What he did to me? Can you feel I’m dirty?” Her voice ended with a dry sob.

  Immediately contrite, Kahtar sat next to Beth again, wrapping his arms around her. They were joined. She could no more have wanted another heart than he could. “No, Beth. His touch is completely gone now. Can you still feel it?”

  She nodded and he thought if she had any spare liquid in her body that her eyes would be full of tears. He covered her hands with his and brought them to his lips. “I’m sorry if I sounded jealous or accusing. The thought of someone else touching your heart like mine—it makes me crazy. I’ve never heard of anyone deriving pleasure from doing such a thing. There have been times I’ve known of a Covenant Keeper to rape a body. But the heart—even the most base and dark clans hold the heart sacred.”

  “There was nothing sacred about it. It was the filthiest thing imaginable. It is what killed me in the end. I went willingly to escape it.”

  “Beth!”

  “He ground against me, both his heart and his body, pulled my underpants off to be closer, but he didn’t—”

  “I know he didn’t, but I hadn’t realized how sick—”

  “I don’t know why he didn’t do that too. All of it, I mean. I thought he would. It didn’t even matter by then, but he didn’t. Maybe because he kept saying I was dirty. I guess he knew I was part seeker. I’ve never hated anyone before, Kahtar, but I hate him.”

  Kahtar was in complete agreement.

  “Sometimes I didn’t know what hurt more, my body or my heart, but in the end I knew it was my heart. And nobody came; nobody came at all, Kahtar. I called Old Guard, but they didn’t come either.”

  He knew she’d called for him too, knew she didn’t want to say it, knew she had to be furious that he hadn’t come. He would never forgive himself. His entire existence was about protecting his people, and he’d failed the one who mattered most to him. Worse still, it was his fault that she’d gone unprotected. As warrior chief he’d known the Old Guard had joined the shunning and stopped listening for her voice. He’d left her unguarded.

  The apartment door swung open, startling him and interrupting their conversation. Kahtar forced his attention to Delphine as she stormed in, dressed like a seeker in a short red dress with leggings. Against clan rules her fingernails were painted as red as the dress. After what she’d done for Beth, he tried to force down his immediate dislike, especially since she carried a tray of food.

  “I’ve been marching up and down the hall carrying this tray for hours waiting for you to wake up and want to eat,” she said to Beth.

  “My wife needs hot food, not something you’ve been carrying around the hallway for hours.”

  “Oh, it’s hot then, piping hot. You’ll need to blow on every bite so she doesn’t burn her mouth.”

  Kahtar glanced at the tray as Beth sighed. Swirls of steam rose off the soup and out of the teapot. He nodded and Delphine slid it across the table.

  “You can go,” he said.

  “You mean I need to stay.”

  “Yes,” said Kahtar. “You need to stay.” Kahtar glanced at the little brunette again, puzzled. “Why do you need to stay?”

  “Because Beth really super-duper needs me here.”

  Kahtar nodded in agreement, wondering why he hadn’t realized how much Beth needed the storyteller there. Although Delphine had helped earlier, he couldn’t think what good she’d do right now.

  “What exactly do you need to do right now?” Unfolding a napkin he dropped it on Beth’s lap and scooted closer, reaching for a spoon.

  “I need to super-duper help her,” said Delphine, plopping into a chair across from them. “‘Cause she super-duper needs me.”

  “Knock it off, Delphine,” said Beth. “I don’t think it’s funny.”

  Kahtar scooped steaming soup onto a spoon and blew on it, wondering what Beth didn’t think was funny.

  She eyed him acerbically. “Seriously, Kahtar, you can’t see that soup is so cold it’s congealed?”

  Despite his cooling breath the soup on the spoon still steamed. Beth’s steely gray eyes had that candid gleam he knew so well, and she was looking at the soup with distaste. Why does she think the soup is cold? He frowned, blowing again as he scanned into Beth’s head.

  Beth lifted both hands to cover her head, smacking the spoon out of his hand. She really can sense a scan!

  “Stop it! There’s nothing wrong with me! Delphine is telling you a story about the soup! It’s cold!”

  “What are you talking about?” Kahtar stuck his fingertip into the soup and yanked it out of the scalding liquid, immediately putting it in his mouth. A blister swelled against his tongue.

  Beth grabbed his hand and inspected the finger. She glared at Delphine. “Do you have any idea how dangerous your gifting is?”

  “Only
when you interfere!” Delphine said. “Kahtar knows better than to stick his finger into boiling liquid until you start putting doubts in his head!”

  What are they going on about? Kahtar’s scalp prickled.

  “His skin actually blistered! Look what you did!”

  Delphine leveled a gaze at Beth that Kahtar didn’t like at all.

  “That’s your fault,” Delphine said.

  “Why would it be anyone’s fault but mine?” Kahtar growled. “I think you should leave, Delphine.”

  Delphine’s face flushed nearly as red as her dress.

  “What about Beth?” she asked.

  Kahtar glanced at his wife. She needs Delphine! “You’re right. Stay,” he said.

  Beside him Beth gave an exasperated sigh. “Kahtar! Think about this! Why do you want her to stay?”

  “Yes, Kahtar,” said Delphine, her voice sounded falsely sweet. “Why should I stay?”

  Kahtar wiped the spoon clean with his fingers, dipping it into the steaming soup again. “Because Beth super-duper needs you.”

  Delphine’s dimples deepened on either side of a huge smile. “See! Beth just doesn’t like to admit that,” she practically sang.

  Kahtar relaxed, lifting the spoonful of soup to Beth’s lips. She slapped it away.

  “Knock it off,” said Beth to Delphine. “Am I supposed to think any of this is funny?”

  “It’s just a lark, Beth. I thought you could use a laugh after all you’ve been through.”

  “After all I’ve been through? You know Cultuelle Khristos treats me like a pariah because my father—whom none of them even know—isn’t a Covenant Keeper, yet you, a full blooded one, use your giftings to make fun of people and satisfy your lusts on good men!”

  “What?” Kahtar sat up straight, looking from Beth’s face to Delphine’s.

  “You have no idea what my motives are!” Delphine’s bright eyes sparked with anger. “Don’t you dare judge me! You don’t know me!” Delphine shoved to her feet, her pretty face crumpling. “You have no clue what I’ve been through!”

  What the blazes is going on here? Kahtar stared at the women. What had Delphine been through? And why was Beth making such outrageous claims?