COSMIC CONVERSATIONS WITH ISAAC

The Man Who Never Took Off the Ring

I have been called many things in my life.

Stubborn.

Difficult.

A pain in the ass with a solar battery bank.

A man who could turn an abandoned mountain ridge into a home and then act surprised when people started bringing me their broken water filters, bad decisions, and emotional baggage.

All true.

But nobody calls me delusional to my face.

That is probably because I am broad-shouldered, tired, and still own an axe.

Still, I know what they say.

Poor Isaac.

Still wearing the ring.

Still living in the Earthship he built with Nysera.

Still keeping Sacred’s room exactly the way she left it.

Still acting like a man can hold a family together with salvaged steel, greenhouse glass, stubbornness, and a refusal to accept the word gone.

They think I do not hear them.

I hear everything.

I just do not care.

There are some things a man does not explain to people who have never loved someone enough to memorize the sound of their bare feet coming down a hallway.

Nysera used to walk like she was late for an argument.

Fast. Purposeful. Barely contained violence in a silk robe.

She would come into the kitchen at six in the morning, hair everywhere, eyes narrowed at the world as though it had personally disappointed her before coffee, and say things like, “Why is the kettle judging me?”

The kettle was not judging her.

It was a kettle.

But she would stand there in one of my shirts, all warm brown skin and long locs and that mouth that had ruined my ability to think in complete sentences, and I would decide the kettle was being rude.

That was the thing about Nysera.

You loved her, and suddenly every inanimate object in the house had to answer for itself.

I loved that woman before the Council gave her a title.

Before the city decided she was important.

Before powerful men with polished voices and expensive coats started looking at her like she was a prophecy wrapped in gold.

I loved her when she was just Ny.

My Ny.

The woman who could repair an entire neural-grid panel in three hours, then come home and nearly set our dinner on fire because she was trying to explain the ethical collapse of Atlantean governance with a wooden spoon in her hand.

She had a brain built for galaxies.

She also could not remember where she put her keys.

Fair balance, I thought.

Then Sacred came along.

And all the big things in my life became small.

Wars were small.

Politics were small.

The city was small.

Because there was this little girl with green eyes and a laugh too big for her body, and she had Nysera’s attitude and my ability to get mud on absolutely everything.

Sacred could turn one hour in the garden into a crime scene.

I would find her sitting beneath a tomato plant, face streaked with dirt, holding some creature she had “rescued” from the ecosystem.

Once it was a lizard.

Once it was three frogs.

Once, it was a dead-looking bird that turned out to be very much alive and deeply offended by the entire household.

Nysera had stood in the doorway, hands on her hips.

“Isaac,” she had said, very calmly, which was always how I knew I was in trouble. “Why is there a bird in our bathtub?”

And Sacred, proud as anything, had said, “Because Daddy said we protect life.”

I had looked at Nysera.

Nysera had looked at me.

Then she had said, “You are both lucky I love you.”

I was.

I am.

That is the whole problem.

Love did not stop because the world got cruel.

It did not stop because Sacred disappeared.

It did not stop because Nysera left our mountain and built walls around the softest parts of herself just to survive the grief.

It did not stop because some ancient, black-coated nightmare with red eyes started standing too close to her.

Let me be very clear.

I.O. Kaereth is not my favorite person.

That is polite.

What I mean is, the man could save every child on Earth, personally fix the Veil, cure insomnia, and hand-deliver a peace treaty to every government on the planet, and I would still look at him like he tracked mud through my kitchen.

He has that face.

That irritatingly calm, beautiful, I-have-seen-the-end-of-the-world-and-it-bored-me face.

The kind of face that makes sensible women forget their names and makes me want to ask if he has ever held a wrench in his life.

Probably not.

Probably just stares at machinery until it becomes afraid and fixes itself.

And Nysera?

Nysera hates him.

Which is terrifying.

Because Nysera only hates things she pays attention to.

She hates him with eye contact.

She hates him with her pulse jumping when he moves near her.

She hates him with that particular silence she gets when she is trying to pretend a man has not just walked into the room and rearranged every molecule of oxygen.

I know my wife.

Ex-wife.

Whatever word makes the paperwork happy.

I know when she is scared.

I know when she is angry.

And I know when desire has gotten its sharp little teeth into her and she is trying to bite it back.

I hate that I know.

I hate that I can see it even from miles away, even after years apart, even after everything.

But I do not hate her for it.

Nysera has survived enough people trying to own her choices.

I will not become one of them.

That does not mean I have to enjoy it.

I am evolved, not dead.

There is also the dragon.

Azrakh Sol’Veyr.

Six feet of emerald eyes, battle scars, and the kind of posture that says he has never had to ask twice for anything in his entire life.

He looks at Nysera like she is a queen he has already chosen to protect.

Which, frankly, makes sense.

Anyone with functioning vision would want to protect her.

But the dragon has that quiet way about him.

The way he steps closer when danger enters the room.

The way he watches Nysera’s hands, not her body.

The way he lets her rage without trying to soften it.

I respect him.

Against my will.

And then there is Elias.

The prince.

Of course, there is a prince.

Because apparently my wife’s life was not complicated enough without a beautiful, politically trapped heir with tragic eyes and a wife he should have handled before he started looking at Nysera like she was the only honest thing in the room.

I do not hate Elias.

That would be easier.

I hate the part of me that understands him.

The part that sees how the system has built a cage around him and called it destiny.

The part that knows he looks at Nysera and sees a way out.

But here is what none of them understand.

Nysera is not a way out.

She is not a reward for choosing the right side.

She is not a cosmic key, a priestess, a weapon, a prophecy, or a beautiful tragedy men get to solve.

She is a woman.

A mother.

A daughter.

A storm with excellent hair and no patience for nonsense.

And she is still the love of my life.

That truth does not mean I expect her to come back.

Love is not a leash.

It is not a claim.

It is not me standing in front of her and saying, Choose me because I suffered.

No.

Love is keeping the light on.

It is planting extra food because maybe someday she comes home hungry.

It is repairing Sacred’s window every spring because one day she might want to look out of it again.

It is writing letters to your daughter every year even when you do not know whether she is alive to read them.

It is leaving room.

That is what I have done.

I left room.

For Nysera.

For Sacred.

For the version of our life that might still exist beyond the lies.

And now the world is telling me Sacred may be alive.

The system is whispering her name.

Nysera is running toward every dangerous truth they buried.

And every man with power is circling her like they have earned the right to stand at her side.

Fine.

Let them come.

Let the god come.

Let the prince come.

Let the dragon come.

But they should understand something before they mistake my silence for surrender.

I am not competing for Nysera.

I am fighting for my family.

And if the universe thinks it can take my daughter, break my wife, and send me a dozen beautiful, terrifying men as obstacles?

Well.

The universe has clearly never met a man with an Earthship, a loaded truck, a ring he never removed, and absolutely nothing left to lose.

—Isaac Lorne

Father of Sacred

Builder of impossible homes

Still in love with one dangerous woman

And deeply tired of gods in black coats

Read Free on Inkitt.com/RaReigns The Saturn Priestess by Ra Divine