Return Once More

Which, it appeared I did.

They were taking a break from riding, the horses grazing along the banks of a stream and the guards wading in the shallow water. Caesarion stood barefoot on the bank, staring down into the trickle of brackish liquid as though it held the secrets to unlocking the universe. Now, with him alive, breathing in front of me, and looking damn sexy in such a relaxed pose, my courage to do what needed to be done withered.

My lips tried hard to smile when he caught sight of me, but I knew they failed. His handsome, ta

He whispered words that meant nothing, nonsensical comfort, into my hair. “Kaia, my love, what’s wrong?”

Over his shoulders, all of the guards had sprung from the water and studied me warily, hands on their weapons. They would kill me if they got the chance, and it hurt that my actions would shorten their lives unfairly. Nothing about this was fair.

I shook my head and held on tighter, never wanting to let him go. Staying long would be too great a risk with Analeigh digging through the Archives at home, but maybe a few minutes. Thirty at the most. Caesarion had to die at the end of them, but surely I had time before it had to be done. Before the rest of my life without his touch and his voice and the warm presence of his solid, lithe form.

“I just wanted to see you.”

“I wanted to see you, too. From the moment you left.” He pulled back and studied my face. “There is something else. What has happened?”

Our relationship had begun with a misunderstanding born of the vast gap between our worlds, and there were still so many things he could never understand. I wished that he could return with me to Sanchi, but it was impossible. We had not perfected time travel from the past into the future—the few attempts had not been successful in circumventing the aging process. Caesarion would be nothing but dust by the time we arrived in 2560.

Staying here wasn’t an option. One second past twenty-four hours and my own organs would liquefy. A voice in the back of my mind whispered that perhaps that was the poetic choice—to die with him in a big pile of romantic goo. But Analeigh was counting on me, and the rest of Genesis was, too. They just didn’t know it yet.

“Nothing happened.”

“You are a terrible liar,” he said with a small smile, before bending to kiss me.

I kissed him back, nothing romantic or sexy about the tears and snot and desperation racing through me and pouring onto him. My legs shook when I pulled away and tried another smile, with a bit more success this time. “I’m actually a pretty good liar. You just see through me.”

“I’m not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse,” he mused.

He grabbed me around the waist and hoisted me onto his chestnut mare, then leaped up into the saddle. His lips moved against my ear, sending tingles and excitement through my abdomen that quickly spilled lower, landing in my knees. It was a far cry from the way Oz’s whispered questions had affected me earlier that day in the Maldives.

Caesarion kicked the horse into motion, his guards following a little too close for comfort. I almost hadn’t bothered with period-appropriate clothing but was now glad I had—we would be riding past other contemporaries, most likely, and the fewer people I had to take out with my waver, the better. We rode in silence for a while, the clomping of the horses’ hooves and the far-off patter of human voices a low hum in the late afternoon heat.

“How long are you staying?”

“Not long.” I pressed my back harder into his chest.

“Perhaps until tomorrow?” he nudged.

I didn’t respond. He pointed out animals and constellations as they appeared, but mostly we breathed together in the soft evening. I put my hand over his and pulled the horse to a stop, turning so that I faced him, my thighs draped over his and our fingers clutched together.

My eyes burned and my throat felt raw from holding back the truth. “Your time, Caesarion. It’s now. Not tomorrow. We’ve already changed too many things, and …” I trailed off as my fingers found Oz’s sonic waver in my bag and pulled it loose.

Fear flashed in Caesarion’s gaze. My heart shattered into so many pieces it would take poor Isis a hundred lifetimes to find them and put me back together.

Steely acceptance banished the other emotions racing across his face. When his eyes raised to mine, they held love and sorrow in equal measure. “If I must die, I want it to be in the arms of the woman I love, not at the hands of a cruel executioner.”

The words squeezed the air from my lungs. The request should have made this easier, but somehow it made it worse that he trusted me enough to give me his final moments. To share them with a girl who had made everything in his life harder from the moment she’d walked into it.

I nodded, and tried to gather some courage, because that’s what I had come here to do—kill him. Make sure that the time line was righted before the repercussions were too many and too far- reaching to be recalled. I slid from the horse onto the marshy ground, then pulled my Historian cloak from my bag and secured it around me. One of the biggest barriers to sonic weaponry during its early development was that the person holding the device became as susceptible as their unsuspecting victim, but the cloaks were built with an adequate barrier. I tied it at my throat, ensuring all of my vital organs were covered, except my face. I would do that last.

Tears spilled down my cheeks. “It will be fast. It won’t hurt.”

Caesarion dismounted and beckoned his guards to do the same, then walked to my side. “I will send them away. If they see you kill me, they will take your life.” He moved a sweaty piece of hair off my forehead. “We can’t have that. You’re going to live a long life, and be happy.”

Happiness seemed impossible in this moment, sacrificed at the altar of my disobedience.

As my True spoke with his guards, who eyed me with distrust but led the horses away until they dropped from sight, I palmed the waver and secured my hood over my hair. My thumb flicked the safety off, the device slipping against my sweaty skin.

Caesarion closed his eyes, pushed his shoulders back, and waited. Tears burned in my throat and I squeezed the waver harder, trying to remember the thousands at home instead of the one in front of me. It wasn’t working. I wasn’t ready.

Everything Caesarion had taught me about duty felt like faraway concepts when faced with putting them into action. I had been kidding myself. I was still the same silly Kaia—a girl who broke the rules but couldn’t grow up enough to handle the consequences.

He’s already dead, I told myself, trying to use the truth as reassurance.

I couldn’t do it. Failure crashed through my system, the hot despair and self-loathing like slime in my veins, but none of it spurred me into action. I dropped my arm to my side. Caesarion opened his eyes when a sob tore from my throat, but didn’t move to touch me. My weakness was making this harder for him, and that killed me more than anything else.

“I’m sorry.” His face blurred through my tears and I gripped the waver tighter. “I can’t.”

Before he could move, Oz popped onto the scene behind him. He held a second waver in his outstretched hand, his body cloaked from head to toe. His gray eyes flicked wildly about the scene, probably searching for Caesarion’s guards. “Kaia, close your hood,” he shouted.

My grief cleared immediately, making way for a panic that jammed my racing heart into my throat. It couldn’t be this way. “Oz, no!”

Caesarion paused, looking between us with fear returning to his posture. The scene moved in slow motion as I ran to his side, but as Oz pushed buttons on his waver and tugged the strings to shield his own face, I instinctively did the same.