Eeva blinked several times. After several moments passed in the silence of the hallway, she said to him, "So they tried to kill you. They knew you'd changed sides, and would alert us. And that's when I found you in the river."
Luka donned a very serious face and looked into Eeva's eyes, and said, "I would have done more than just alert you."
She looked up at him and trusted him. His words were true. Even the Outlanders who bred him to hate knew he had a pure heart. She felt even more confident in her choice to make him interim leader somehow. He knew the enemy better than any. She vowed to never tell the people about his past with the Outlanders. While Eeva and his group could understand, the people could not. They would hate him, someone to point their fingers of blame towards.
In Luka's mind, he still wasn't completely sure why Lleyton ordered him dead when he first looked down upon Eeva from that branch. He knew Lleyton loved him, which made the order that much stranger. Lleyton could have ordered him captured and returned to the underground. He felt something else, more nefarious, was at work.
Luka lightly touched her shoulder, and made his way back to the smallest guest chamber where he slept the first night he awoke after his coma, and wished Eeva a goodnight. She sadly smiled at him and entered her own chamber, Mikkael already fast asleep.
Luka removed his clothes to shower. He set the stick of wood that he retrieved from Panza's room at Maeve's request on a counter beside his bed, which he felt foolish for risking his life for, along with Lleyton's wolf pendant, and entered the stream of water.
The hot water washed away blood and dirt, his wounds no longer visible but the blood still dried seemingly everywhere on his body which he scrubbed off vigorously. He didn't know what blood was his. He envisioned the water washing away the stains of the horrors that he had endured, the guilt that he felt, the scars from the lives he himself took – and of those he was responsible for. He dried himself off and changed into a night gown that a servant had left for him. He climbed into his bed, which felt smaller and firmer since the first night he had slept in it.
Before his eyes closed, he heard quiet footsteps from the hall. There was a quiet knock on his door. Luka quietly called for the person to enter.
It was Eeva, in a black night gown and slippers that she changed into, her dark golden hair down.
She slowly approached him. Her cheeks wet with tears. She had been crying, finally able to let out her emotions behind closed doors. Luka took her hand and sat her beside him. He didn't know how to comfort her, he didn't know what to say.
She looked up into his eyes through a layer of tears. He wiped one away with his sleeve from her cheek.
"Luka, our people, we live by three words. One of which is 'open'. I fear I haven't adhered to this with you, even with myself, with my feelings..."
She paused for a moment, and then said, "Don't leave us again."
This selfless man, so willing to put others first, but with a sliver of shadow which loomed over him Eeva couldn't help but think was necessary for their upcoming perilous predicament. She felt terrible for ever mistrusting him. They needed him more than ever now with her father gone. And now with her father gone, the lessons he taught her of diplomacy with the Boy with No Name rang even truer.
The walls that gated the feelings she had for him were torn down that night.
He returned her face to his by gently guiding her chin with his hand, and looked seriously into her eyes. "Eeva, I need you more than you need me. I wouldn't... I can't... go anywhere else."
She kissed him as the last word left his mouth, her soft lips locked with his in a grief stricken yet thankful embrace.
It was a light in the darkness that hand-in-hand, the two walked towards.
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