“It was a line they didn’t follow for very long,” inserted Thane sarcastically.
“But you did know that they had taken my parents when you met me?” I asked sadly.
“When we met you, we did research on you until we knew everything there was to know about you. And we thought that your parents would just be another detriment to you accepting your place with us. If you were all alone, you were more likely to want to stay with us,” explained Corran softly.
There it was. The truth stood there tall and foreboding between us, threatening everything. I had promised them that nothing they would say could change how I felt about them. But was that the truth?
“You told me you had changed. Have you really? Or was that just something you told me to try and save us?” I asked them, staring at the table, too afraid to hear what their answer really would be.
Derrial gently took me off his lap and stood up. I watched as the other two stood up as well. They all towered over me, staring at me intently before they got down on their knees. My heart began to flutter at the sight.
“We’re sorry, Ella. So fucking sorry for how everything has happened. If you’ll give us a chance, we’ll show you that we’ve changed...even if it takes the rest of our lives,” said Derrial in a broken voice that was far from the confident Vepar that I was so familiar with.
I looked at all three of them, knowing that they were giving me a choice for the first time since they had kidnapped me. I could forgive them, and we could move on and hopefully have a chance at happiness, or I could choose to hate them and maybe still be forced to be with them regardless. But all of our lives would be terrible.
I knew looking at them, that it actually wasn’t a choice at all. I was theirs. There was no choice but to love them, to forgive them. Despite everything that had happened, they had saved me. Saved me from a life where I had been literally fading away.
Now looking at them, I could see how much they had changed, how much they had softened and melded to resemble a love that I had been looking for my whole life and just hadn’t known it.
Maybe they had saved me. But I had also saved them.
“I forgive you,” I told them, sinking to my own knees in front of them.
There were no sounds but the rustle of clothes being taken off, and the intake of soft breaths and groans as we lost ourselves in each other.
I would get my happily ever after one way or another.