He cannot read her face, and it leaves him breathless for her response. She closes her eyes and breaks his desperate searching of her eyes, walling him off as effectively as if she'd turned away. His heart rests on tenterhooks, held up only by the possibility that not everything was lost, that somewhere in the small mare rested some capacity to forgive him for his crimes. To allow him to make it up to her somehow.

His hope careens upward like a bird catching an updraft as she leans into him, and he hastens to return the pressure; he presses into the caress with his own green eyes shuttering closed. Solomon swallowed hard against the lump in his throat and tried to wait out her silence with the patience that she deserved. He can feel the no coming in the way she hesitates. The protest. The but. The ending of something that had once consumed them. A levee being placed where a tide once rose and fell. A door slamming shut with a new please knock sign installed.

She pulls away from him and drops her gaze to the ground like a chastened filly rather than the warrior Queen that she was. It unsettles him in a way he cannot place immediately, as if the topography he'd come to know had skewed a few degrees, resulting in something close but not quite the same as it was before.

She spoke again, stumbling over her words like a child confessing to a crime, and he struggled to follow along through the stops and starts. In the fall, she said, and he cannot help but wonder if this was before or after he'd returned. If he would have been able to protect her in some way. You know what they do, she continues and his whole form tenses, rabid at the thought of any of them touching her against her will. His ears sweep back against his poll and his jaw clenches, even as he does his best to stand stoically to hear the tale, to know the villain.

Instead, she swerves off the highway of his assumptions at the last second, taking the ill-marked country road he hadn't even known that he should be looking out for.

Claim me, she says and he freezes further - breath stalling, eyes unblinking - as he sorts through what she had said. Claim. Not just have her. Not just hold her. Not just a singular act to save her from something that he had never before seen her express fear of.

But to Claim.

To take the words that Solomon had offered to her, vowed to her, promised to her. To replace him. The wound is sudden and absolute; a heated blade severing a limb - hot enough to cauterize the wound before he can bleed out, but so decisive that it couldn't be anything but an end - and he sucks in a ragged, weak breath.

Still, she twists the blade deeper, driving it further into his chest and he swallows, blinking furiously against the alien wetness on his lashes. He was all that I had left. He who? Who? Who had taken her from him? And not just taken her, but claimed her?

But he knew.

Of course, he knew.

Who else was there, save Bacardi?

Why else would the insolent little stallion feel so comfortable disrespecting him when he came the first time? What else would have made him so comfortable, so bold.

"When?" He croaks out, his voice hoarse and low, barely audible but insistent. He had to know. He had to know if the bastard had taken her beneath him before or after his return, if Solomon had even been an option, or if she had forsaken him by choice. "When, Valka?" He demands again, his body stiff, weight shifted back and away from her. The words gain substance the longer he speaks, and his tone roughens, slowly losing the softness that he had once reserved for her. "Was it before or after I came for you?"

Later, when sense has had time to soften the raw edges of his emotion, he will understand that she has already told him her version. That she either didn't know or didn't care that Solomon was back when she made her choice. That she had chosen Bacardi, and had accepted his claim of her instead of Solomon's, and that there was nothing the Tinuvel King could do about it.

Whether Valka was brave enough to admit it or not, she had made her choice, and now all either of them could do was live with it.

Solomon