Hold on,I sent the thought to her.Through the circuit.Through the bond.Through every channel the Skybond had built between us in the dark of the cave.I have you.Hold on.
Seconds passed.They felt like hours.Like eternity.A moment frozen in time.
The surge finished.
The cliff face went quiet.The arced light died.The air lost its taste of ozone.Found instead the cold mineral dark of the rock and the warm scent of Sloane.She hung in the air, still pressed to my chest.Her hands still locked on my forearm.Her heartbeat fast and ragged.“Hold on.I’ve got you.”
I pulled her up to me and settled us both on the ledge.Breathed her in.Held the knowledge the storm had left behind in my entire system like sediment.What my mate felt.What she wanted.What she hid behind her walls and her professional voice.What she needed and what she feared.
She knew me now, as well.She had to.The circuit had run both ways.
Tremors ran through her in small continuous waves.I held her closer, my arm locked at her waist.My face in her hair.My nodes still blazed.My chest was so full of impossible emotions that breathing around them was almost impossible.
"Sloane."I whispered her name against her hair.Low and rough and not entirely steady.All the things I could not say were in my voice.
She took a deep breathe.Sighed.Opened her hand.
The last crystal sat in her palm.Jagged and pale.Precisely the size she had specified.Exactly what the stabilizer coil required.She had held onto it through the storm surge and being thrown off the cliff.Through long moments of current moving through her body.Through mine.While the storm rewrote the bond between us in light, in electricity, in truth.
She had held on.
She hadn’t let go.
"We need to descend before the next discharge cycle."
"Yes."I did not move my arm.
She looked down at it.At the arm still around her waist.At my face, still close to hers.At whatever was in my expression that I made no effort to conceal.
Her throat moved.
I pressed my lips to her forehead.Slowly.Deliberately.No pretense.Not protective instinct.Not reflex.
A choice.To love her.To accept her.To be whatever she needed.The promise that I needed her more than I needed anything else.
She went completely still."Sorik?—"
"I know."I spoke against her hair.Into it.Her scent filled every breath.The warm, stark reality of her soaked into my lips.The bond settled into its new depth the way the valley settled after a storm — quiet, clean, irrevocably altered."I know.We are running out of time."
11
Sloane
We started climbing down.
The most bizarre, unreal, fucking crazy thing?I wasn’t dead.I’d been practically electrocuted and all I’d felt was Sorik’s arm around me, his emotions in the energy field around us.The storm doing what storms do.It felt normal.Natural to have him in my head, to feel my heart match the rhythm of his, to absorb the heat and wildness of the planet’s storms.It was all insane by human standards.But I wasn’t sure I was human.Not anymore.
I needed to reach the ground.I needed solid earth under my feet and open air around me, and distance — real distance.I couldn’t think with him so close.With the maddening proximity of him below me on this cliff face where I could feel his warmth rising against my back with every move I made.
I was running out of cliff.
Worse, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way his arm felt around me.The terror that gripped me when I fell.The relief when he caught me, grabbed me out of the air as if I weighed nothing.Held me as an unbelievable amount of energy ran through us both like we were two gigantic pieces of copper wire, the storm’s power flowing through us like water through a pipe.
This place had changed me.Hechanged me.Every cell in my body had reorganized itself around his existence sometime in the last two days and I hadn't been consulted about it.I couldn't stop it.And the worst part?The devastating truth?I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to the way I was before.
Iwantedhim to touch me.Iwantedhim to make my body go crazy.I wanted to lose control.Give him everything.Believe I could have a life here where I was happy.Loved.Not alone.
That was the truth I'd been climbing away from all morning.Simple truth.Emotional, not logical.Completely impossible to rationalize.My skin ached for him.My lips.The marks on my collarbones pulsed their warm steady reminder with every move I made as if they were talking to me —you know what this is, you know what this is, you know what this is.