pt 1/2
“You should have talked to me sooner. Why take it this far if there was a concern that might have made you call the whole thing off?” He couldn’t argue with the last point, that the interrogation into her feelings for Mikino had been unexpected. He wished he could have heard the conversation in its entirety. Something coming from either of them held more weight than common gossip, but he did not wish to take a side in this.
“You could have responded exactly like that, Avalynn. You have every right to deny her those answers. Then even more than now.” She had just been Chaldean, after all. Things were trickier now. Azyebel was Queen and even if Ava turned out to be the wounded party in all of this, that meant Mikino could never truly turn his back on Lady Salicar. The Sidhe needed her, and she needed him. “Yet you sought it out for some closure, and that seems the only course to finding it.”
He tensed again at the word “irrelevant”, stopping and turning to look at her, though all he saw from his angle was her profile, which was not likely to reveal much. A younger Mikino would have gone to her then, and the thought still flickered defiantly across his mind. He would have made all those assurances he thought she needed to hear, and he wouldn’t have meant a word.