“You don’t get to tell me how to parent my kid,” she growls. “You spent a few days with him, and you think you have the right? It is breaking—” Her voice cracks and she pauses, starts again. “It is breaking my heart to know Vee might internalise all this shit. Until he’s legally an adult and Dominik has nothing to hold over my head, I’m choosing the lesser evil. I don’t need you here, criticising me for an already impossible decision.”
My hand moves of its own accord. One moment, Marlowe’s glaring at me, and the next, my palm is pressed to her cheek. She stares at me, wide-eyed. A tear clings to her lower lashes, trembling. Her eyes rove over my face, frantically, greedily. It’s been one day, and I’ve missed her already.
“Valeja.” It’s a plea and an accusation all in one word.
The tear falls. A sob rips free from her chest. Then her mouth is on mine, and she’s kissing me, fiercely, desperately. It feels like being resuscitated, like being dragged from the edge of a ruinous fate. Before her, I don’t think I ever truly knew what it meant to be alive. My heart settles for the first time since she walked away from me. With Marlowe in my arms, I can breathe again, and I take advantage of it by sipping at her lips, coaxing them open and tasting her.
“Tee,” she gasps against me. “Tee.”
A shudder rolls through me to hear her call me that; a name just between us.
“Please come with me.” I plead between kisses. “I have a ship now. It’s calledHomebound.”
From the very beginning, I’ve been unable to resist her. This tightness in my chest makes it painfully obvious that there’s no decision I won’t make to have her. And I remember, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I used to consider myself rational, used to believe in logic over heart. Scoffed at the idea of being in love, because the stories I heard were inconceivable. Now I prostrate myself before her, anyway, in the hopes that I may one day be so lucky.
Before today, I would never have foughtanyoneon a decision to protect their child. If she’ll just let me help her, I can get her away from Gryphon. If she’ll just—
Her hands sink into the hair at my nape, and she presses me back against the wall, closes all space between us except the one now between our mouths.
“Remember the first time you nearly kissed me?” she whispers.
“Marlowe—”
“Remember?”
Of course I do. I’d thought of nothing but her all day. Even though she confused and annoyed me, she was also fascinating. She’d shaken everything up, and something in me started to change right then and there—it started towant. I was attracted to her fight, that big heart of hers, and those molten eyes.
Marlowe looks at me now as though she’s unsure, as though she genuinely thinks I might have forgotten. But that day is important to me, and I want to reassure her that I’ll never need reminding.
“You were worried about Samiran,” I admit with a humourless laugh.
“Why is that funny?”
I meet her eyes, warm and dark and endless, and nudge her nose with mine. “Like anyone else could matter after you.”
She burrowed into my life with such ease.
Marlowe kisses me again, slanting her mouth against me and teasing me with her tongue. She tastes like champagne and fruit, and smells like lemons. It’s too much and not enough. I pull away, press chaste kisses to her neck at first, then devolve into sloppy, open-mouthed things that reveal too much of my need to consume her. She arches her spine, moans into my touch.
“You called mesundara,” Marlowe rasps.
I kiss the side of her jaw.
She groans. “You asked me who was waiting for me.”
I kiss the space where her jaw meets her ear.
“You said my name and looked at me like you’d never seen anyone like me before.”
When I meet Marlowe’s eyes, she’s crying. She pushes my hands away and tries to kiss me again, tries to ignore the pain coming off her in waves. But I catch her wrists and steer her towards the bed until it hits the back of her knees, and she’s forced to sit.
I sink to the floor before her—kiss the soft, fragrant skin of her wrists.
“I’m waiting for you,” I say.
She’s trying to convince herself that eight years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but Marlowe isn’t the kind of bright thing you can pin in place. She’ll fade away in Gryphon’s clutches, all in the name of protecting Vee. I respect it, I understand it, but there must be another way—if only she’d justconsiderit. Her fear blinds her. She’s spent too long doing it all on her own; she can’t see she’s not alone anymore.
With her hands freed, Marlowe swipes at her wet cheeks. I curl my fingers around her calves and lay my head in her lap, and we just sit here, like this. For a quiet moment, my heart doesn’t ache, and her tears don’t fall. She sifts fingers through my hair, and I run my palm over the soft skin of her leg.
