Heat rushed to my face. “I thought it was a dream!”
He leaned in, his face mere inches from mine.
“Even so,” he murmured. “You dream of me. Your soul knows where it belongs.”
“Talon, this cannot continue.” I shook my head.
Talon ignored me, his eyes moving around the chamber. “Why are you here? I thought we established the Keeper cannot be trusted?”
“I fell ill,” I said.
“I would have come to you, little flame.”
I offered him a pointed look. “Talon, you know that is risky. Every time we are together, it gets harder to pretend I do not want to be with you.”
“Then do not pretend,” he growled.
“I cannot,” I whispered. “The consequences will be too great.”
“I am a selfish man, little flame. I could not care if the whole realm fell to dust around us, as long as we are together.”
Talon’s eyes darkened, but I hardly had time to take note of the shift, because his fingers were gripping my chin and his face was moving toward mine.
His mouth captured mine in a kiss that was not savage but consuming, deep and searching and aching with something neither of us had fully allowed to surface before.
My hands fisted in his shirt, pulling him closer. He responded immediately, one arm wrapping around my waist, the other sliding into my hair, tilting my head to deepen the kiss.
Heat surged through me, sharp and intoxicating, pooling between my thighs and stealing the breath from my lungs.
When his hand slipped beneath the hem of my nightgown, skimming the bare skin of my thigh, my knees weakened.
“Talon,” I breathed against his mouth, half warning, half plea.
His fingers traced upward slowly, as though giving me every opportunity to stop him.
I did not.
Instead, I arched into his touch, my body answering with a humiliating eagerness. I hated that my skin seemed to recognize his touch better than it recognized my own.
He guided me backward until the mattress met my legs, lowering me onto it without breaking the kiss. His weight followed, pressing me into the thin bedding, solid and entirely too real.
His hands left my waist, gliding upward until they found mine, drawing my arms above my head and holding them captive against the stone.
The sensation building inside me was no longer only desire. It was something deeper. It was a terrifying erasure. Every moan that left my throat felt like a brick pulled from the wall of who I used to be.
When release tore through me, it felt less like pleasure and more like impact, as though two fractured halves had collided with enough force to mend. My back arched, a cry breaking frommy throat as something unseen snapped into place within my chest.
Talon’s breath left him in a ragged exhale that bordered on a snarl, and the tattoos across his skin ignited—not all at once, but in spreading lines of light that chased along his arms, climbed the column of his throat, and flared at the hollow of his collarbone.
From the illuminated ink burst strands of light. Silver and deep blue spirits unfurled like ribbons pulled from flame, circling us in widening arcs.
They wove around us in a luminous storm, their light reflecting off bare skin and tangled sheets, off the iron bent at the window, off the carved sigils etched into the walls. The chamber glowed as though submerged beneath starlight.
Outside, wind roared against the Archives, echoing the storm raging within the chamber.
Slowly the spiral began to contract.
The spirits circled tighter, faster, until they collapsed inward in one blinding convergence, pouring back into Talon’s skin in streams of liquid light.