Kohelet's heart leaps at his initial shake of the head, eager to take the easy way out and put this all behind them. However, it is immediately clear that that is not his answer. There is more that lurks behind his golden eyes as he sorts out the meaning behind her broken inquiries. She wishes - not for the first time - that she could read his mind. Not that he could speak, Kohelet wouldn't change him, but that she could understand him without misunderstandings. She believed him to be a good man, but she would give everything she had to hear him say it to her.

The silence stretches so long it becomes something else entirely, a malignant creature that looms between them, impossible to ignore. It goes so long it becomes incriminating, the truth lain bare in the absence of his denial and yet still she does not let hope go, but clings with knuckles that have gone pale from the intensity of her grasp. As long as there is a sliver of doubt that she can point to, an explanation - no matter how far-fetched - she can spin, she cannot let go of the possibility that he is as good as she believes him to be.

As good as she needs him to be.

And so they stand frozen, unmoving, as he decides.

In the end, it isn't even the nod that breaks her, although the reverberation of the small movement thrums through her body like a death knell. In the end, it is the detachment on his face, the whole and total lack of remorse or regret or chagrin that shreds her heart into ribbons. There is not even a flicker of fear there that speaks to his understanding that he is losing her in this moment, that the thing that had once held them so closely together is breaking at its foundation, fracturing beyond repair. That they are lost to each other, despite standing close enough their breath still plumes together in the chilly air.

"Oh," the surprised exhalation slips out of her against her will, forlorn and quiet. The tears she had tried so hard to quell rose and spilled over silently, clinging to the lashes. She could not make herself move, could not feel her hooves where they rested against the frigid Tinuvel soil. Kohelet had spent so long planning for Fell's denial that she had avoided considering what she would do if Rafe had told the truth. Where she would go. Who she would take.

Some inner part of her took the broken shards of her heart in blood-stained hands and lifted them in supplication. Pleaded with her to forgive him, cried out that a promise to never do it again was enough of an apology to make up for what he had done. Kohelet silenced that voice - fingers on a candle wick until it snuffed out with a curl of smoke - and said nothing. An apology was not enough, not that Fell could give one even if he'd wanted to. Kohelet wasn't sure that there was anything that could make up for what he had done to Viveka. The horrors he had inflicted on her, the pain she'd had to live with.

Bile churned in her stomach and she swallowed hard, closing her eyes to steel herself. When she opened them again, she found she could not look at him without imagining him the way Viveka must have seen him, the way she must have feared him. It was not her lover that stood before her, but a monster. A monster she had allowed to reign free, had advocated for, had claimed for.

"I have to go." She choked out, and backed away from him with small shakes of her head. Even as she turned to flee and the realization came that she did not fear him giving chase, that some part of her knew she would be protected from his wrath because of who she was and what bloodlines she carried, the guilt intensified. Viveka - and the possibility of nameless others that he could not or would not admit to - had no such protection. Countless others that had suffered beneath the very same man she had loved.

Had loved.

Had.

The acknowledgment of the past tense, of the finality of that thought alone haunted her all the way back to the Cove.