Perfect Timing
She always joked about his perfect timing. Always there to save her in the nick of time. He'd smile mysteriously – just another of Valek's miracles and a magician never reveals his secrets.
And each time he couldn't help but wonder when he would be just that little bit off, when his luck wouldn't hold, when his strange brand of anti-magic would fail him and he would arrive to the scene of her bloody cut throat and the dust of her murderers on the wind.
It haunted him. His nightmares, on the nights the risk of sound was not worth his life. Every night he watched as she left and never returned, walked into the blazing stable and didn't magically appear afterwards wreathed in smoke and missing only her eyebrows and some hair, lunged from her crate cage straight into the waiting blades of a dozen Daviians.
All he could do upon waking was clutch her petite form to him, kiss her forehead with all the weight of a butterfly's wings flapping – Yelena, love. And that was on the rare nights they could be together. When he woke and she was not there…people died those nights. He was not known for kindness and after a night of horrifying visions with no beauty to wake to, he ensured he could at least sleep the next night by eliminating any and all possible threats. If the Commander wondered at the occasional spurts of violent assassinations, he did not ask.
He was Valek, the perfect assassin, the scourge of Sitia, the hero to his love. She trusted him without doubt or hesitation to always be there when she needed him. And he certainly intended to meet her expectations.
But at three in the morning when he blinked up at a thatched roof or the stars and a film of crimson blood blinded him to anything but the awful shaking in his body and soul…he was just a man, too often separated from his soulmate and desperate to keep her safe if it meant the rest of the world collapsed.
He was sure that should frighten him.