I am so tired, I thought.
Tired of thinking about Feyre Archeron.
As if she wasn't the center of my universe, and now she is little more than my greatest enemies' High Lady.
High Lady of the Night Court.
It suited her. Suited my shipwrecked ego that she made the decision to go with the High Lord that could offer her what she wanted most. Her freedom. Freedom to be whatever she wanted, no limits required, and had a Court and smart enough mind to give it to her when she asked for it.
She had grown so much from the human girl in the cabin.
Save him, please. The High Lady in her pleaded him to save her mate. His enemy. The one that killed his brothers'. Traitor of the highest order, and in her arms, her pleading, how could he not do it?
Walking away was the hardest part.
Feyre had grown so fast when he wasn't looking, especially when he wasn't looking, it was alarming as it was endearing, and perhaps it was the human in her still to keep doing so in whatever place she found herself in these days.
How I remembered it in her time here with me.
Her insatiable need to swallow life while she could, and grow without restraint for whatever little time she had left. No day was wasted. No hour was not some time to learn, to wonder, explore, and see my land and people through her eyes. She could have been a faeling, if her words did not ring with so much wisdom I seemed to forget her age altogether.
Perhaps that is why I could not stop it, stop beating myself over the fact that even if she had lied, used, and hated me with every fiber of her being... I could not. I would not do that to her, she who sacrificed, she who had seen the most sacred parts of myself, and had walked away, and yet I could not do that to her.
I am tired of putting Feyre on a pedestal, the emptiness of the Manor got to me at the thoughts, but like a poison I willingly drank, I could not stop loving her.
From the first moment...
"Tamlin." It was Lucien again. "Won't you eat?"
The brush of my thumb against my lip was my only answer.
Thoughts of Feyre were enough for me.
"It is Winter Solstice Tamlin." As if that made a difference to me. Feyre would be celebrating somewhere else, with another man, and I was stuck here, with no one, but the ghosts of happier days.
"You are going to be alone Tamlin." It was as if Lucien read my mind, our eyes connecting, and he didn't shrink away. He didn't have to, not to the shell of a man already dead.
"So be it." Is my dull response.
Lucien leaves me to my moping, just like the sentinels, just like every subject I once had the responsibility of caring for.
"So be it."
There is little a male can do when he has no ambition, but to torment himself with things that could have been.