“It was.”
She holds my gaze. The mark flares beneath her collarbone—I can see it through the thin fabric of her clothing, a glow that matches the heat building in my own sternum. The air between us thickens. Charged. Heavy with awareness that has been building since the moment she touched my mark in that prison cell and spoke my brother’s name.
“The dead.” She swallows. “Did they?—”
“They found peace.” The words cost me more than I expected. “Every one of them. They spoke their truths, and then they let go.”
“Good.” Her eyes glisten. “That’s good.”
“You gave them what I couldn’t.” I reach for her then—can’t stop myself, don’t want to stop myself. My hand finds hers on the mattress, rough fingers closing around her smaller ones. The contact sends a pulse through both marks, bright and hot. “What I should have given them all along.”
“Drokhar—”
“This is a terrible idea.” I can feel her pulse racing through our joined hands. Can feel the mark singing between us, demanding completion. “The King is still out there. The Council wants you dead. We have no plan?—”
She sits up.
Not slowly, not carefully—she surges upward and grabs the front of my armor, pulling me toward her with strength that shouldn’t be possible for someone who was unconscious minutes ago. Her face is inches from mine. I can feel each exhale ghosting across my mouth.
“I know.” Her fingers tighten in my collar. “I don’t care.”
The first kiss is desperate.
Years of loneliness colliding with years of needing to be needed. I pin her to the mattress and she arches into me, her fingers scrabbling at armor buckles, her mouth hungry against mine. There’s nothing gentle about it. Nothing soft. Two people who deal in death, trying to prove they’re still alive.
I pull back long enough to strip off my armor—leather and iron hitting the floor with thuds I barely register. She’s working at her own clothing, the thin fabric she was wearing when they threw her in that prison cell, and then there’s nothing between us but skin and the marks that burn where they touch.
She gasps when I press my palm to her collarbone.
I groan when she presses hers to my sternum.
The contact is electric—not simply physical but magical, the mating bond singing between us like a wire pulled taut. Heat floods through me, obliterating thought, reducing me to instinct and need and the desperate certainty that I will die if I don’t have her.
Her hands explore the scars on my torso—burn marks from pyres, blade cuts from revenants, the map of violence that is the only decoration I’ve ever worn. She traces each one with fingers that speak for the dead, and the touch becomes sacred. Reverent. An acknowledgment of every ending I’ve witnessed.
My mouth finds her throat. Her collarbone. The mark that blazes beneath her skin, calling to its twin. She moans when I kiss it—a sound that goes straight through me, making my blood run hot.
“Drokhar—”
“Tell me to stop.” I barely recognize my own voice. Rough. Wrecked. The voice of a man who has spent his life burning and is finally learning what it means to kindle instead. “Tell me this isn’t what you want.”
Her answer is to wrap her legs around my hips and pull me closer.
I bury myself in her like a man seeking sanctuary.
She wraps around me like a woman who has finally found home.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DROKHAR
The mark blazes between us—mine and hers, flaring with light that fills the dim quarters, that drives back the shadows gathered in the corners. I can feel her everywhere—in my body, in my blood, in the primal certainty that she is mine and I am hers and nothing in this world or the next will ever change that.
We find a rhythm—urgent and primal, the kind that needs no words. Her body responds to mine, arching, meeting, demanding. The sounds she makes are unlike any whisper for the dead—raw and alive and entirely for me. Her nails rake down my back. My teeth find her shoulder. Pain and pleasure blur until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
She cries out when she crests—my name, or maybe a prayer, or maybe both. The sound breaks the last of my control. I follow her over the edge, spilling into her with a groan that tears from somewhere deeper than my throat.
For one perfect moment, the dead fall silent.