“Yeah, I know how it sounds,” he continued fiercely. “Here I am, getting your hopes up again! Or worse, I sound like I’ve lost my fucking mind. And I don’t care! I think we were meant for each other—to be a team, to fall in love, all of it! Because no matter what parts we got wrong, there’s no version of this story where I don’t fall in love with you.”
Slowly, tortuously slowly, Ellery lowered Iskarius. Domenic’s chest heaved, in triumph, in relief.
“I love you, too,” she breathed.
Then Ellery dropped the wand, and they broke toward each other. Their mouths met, their kiss urgent and desperate andslick with tears, and Domenic crushed her against him until not an inch separated them, until not one force could’ve divided them. Immediately, Winter streamed through his veins like ice water, and he shuddered as his every nerve ignited. Even with his eyes closed, he saw color, thousands and thousands of shades of it. A future so vibrantly, undeniably bright.
He couldn’t fathom how he’d never seen it before.
Of course Ellery Caldwell was his destiny. For if he had been made for anything, it was her. Her magic ran in his marrow. Her thumbprint was branded into his heart. And years and years from now, when his body lay to rest in the woods somewhere and fate had had its fill, they would know him, not from the wand frozen at his side, but from her name carved into his bones. That would come closer to the truth than any movie or monument could dare aspire. And that truth would be more than enough for him.
Wind blustered through the open window and whirled around them as they twined together. Its snowflakes glittered in Ellery’s lashes, melted and steamed against Domenic’s skin. Her fingers fumbled over the buttons of his vest, and Domenic shrugged off his suit jacket, bending so as not, for even a morsel of a second, to part his lips from hers. She moved onto his shirt collar next, and chills swept across him as the frigid air met his bare chest. Gently, he tugged at the straps of her dress, and he watched it ripple over the crests of her shoulders and fall, lost, into the umbra of her shadow. The slip beneath was petal-thin, and as his hands skimmed over where it hugged the slopes of her hips, he marveled that, in all the scenarios he’d contemplated when he’d come here, never had he considered this one, the only one imaginable, the only one inevitable.
Then, with his face cupped in her hands, Ellery guided him down the hallway. He stumbled, but he didn’t dare draw away. Not even as they laughed at their clumsiness, at their euphoria.
The lamp on the nightstand brightened as Domenic sat on the bed.
Even as he reached toward her, the pads of his fingers just barely brushing the silk of her slip, she didn’t move to him. She hovered there, her gaze roaming over his face. He knew his magic must be obvious, embers aglow in his eyes no different than her bright, unnatural blue. But he lifted his chin boldly, letting her study him. It was a relief not to prove himself. It was a relief to be beheld.
He smiled, and so did she.
Finally, she lowered onto him. Her fingers slid through his hair until she grasped ahold of him and tilted back his head. Her mouth met the pulse point beneath his jaw. He squeezed her thighs at both his sides, dizzy with the sensation of how soft she was. Of his hips crushed against hers. Of her cold so near his throat. And as her lips trailed down the hollow of his neck, his hands coaxed up the hem of her slip. He relished the sound Ellery uttered as he drew a slow, sinuous pattern across every curve of her, every groove of her spine. Until his hands found her back, and, holding her close, he laid her upon the sheets. Her hair cascaded around his face. Her tongue grazed his own.
It was so easy to get lost in this, in her. But he knew how little time they could spare, that not even he had the power to draw a curtain over the sun and grant them a whole, perfect night. Besides, he didn’t want to rush. Because the truth was, despite the lurid gossip surrounding Domenic Barrow, he’d only ever slept with two people. And the first time, it’d been based only on the assumption that it wasnothis first time, and he hadn’t been brave enough to correct her. After that, there no longer seemed a point in being precious.
Neither of those instances felt remotely like this.
Not that Ellery knew that history. And yet, as she grasped his belt buckle, he felt her whisper against his ear, “Is this all right?”
He drew away to look at her. “Of course it is.” His breath fogged in the air. “Even if we were Chosen, I choose you. I’ll always choose you.”
“I’ll always choose you, too,” she echoed, without hesitation.
As time eddied past and fate kept course, one by one, lights blackened across the skyline. But Domenic didn’t notice.
It was perfect all the same.
XXXVIIIELLERY
WINTER
“It’s always been so obvious, hasn’t it?” Ellery murmured, her cheek against Domenic’s chest. “This. Us.”
Domenic gently brushed a tendril of hair from her face. “At the risk of sounding corny, I think part of me always knew.”
In the dreamy dim of Ellery’s bedside lamp, Alderland’s Chosen Two lay curled beneath the covers, impossibly, inevitably together. The windows were shut. The shades were drawn. A clock ticked on the nightstand, marking time’s passage in the outside world even as they carved out a fraction of it for their own.
“I do recall a confession of you fantasizing about me for five years.” Ellery tilted her head back and smirked. “Come on. You can’t expect to admit that and have me never tease you about it.”
“I never said you couldn’t tease me,” he drawled.
Ellery laughed. She wished they could linger the way they deserved, reclaiming every moment they had so foolishly denied themselves. But the rest of the country could only wait so long.
“If we’re going to be the first Chosen Ones to survive our cataclysm, then I think we’re meant to do more than just save Alderland,” she said, sobering. “I think we’re meant to change it.”
“So do I.Thisis what the prophecy meant by peace. No more ghasts. No more scurges. And Summer and Winter wands serving Alderland side by side.”
“That’s what I want, too. But even with the right wielder paired with a winterghast heart, in Winter territory, we still couldn’t make a Winter wand.”
