I drop to my knees beside her, nose inches from hers. “I’d rather watch you hate me from bed than die on some martyr’s pyre.”
Her chest heaves. She’s breathing too fast. Eyes slick.
“You act like I don’t care,” she breathes. “Like I’m just a blade on your hip.”
I laugh, hollow. “You are a blade. But you’re also the heart I signed up to protect.”
She rolls her eyes. “I’m not your project.”
I grip the map. “I’m not trying to fix you. I?—”
Her hand clamps my jaw and pushes me into the map. Charcoal smears across my cheek.
“You’re scared,” she spits. “You let me believe in hope while you kept the edge sharp.”
“There are edges for a reason.”
She stands, ripping the map free underneath me. I taste chalk and blood on my tongue.
“Maybe I’m not yours to save,” she says, voice cracking. “Maybe I’m just yours to bury.”
She turns away.
Something in me snaps hard—a blade folding, then springing open again. I stand, wipe the chalk from my face. I follow her.
She’s pacing, hands clenched, eyes wild. Her chest rises and falls in ragged bursts, like each breath is caught on the edge of a blade. She’s shaking and I feel it—feel her fury, her grief, her need like it’s threaded into my own marrow.
I take both her hands. She doesn’t pull away.
“I am terrified,” I admit. My voice is low, raw. “Of losing you. Of how much this—us—means.”
She stares at me, breathing hard. Her chocolate-dark eyes burn like coals, like they’re trying to sear their truth into me. Her lips part. Then close. Then?—
She’s in my arms.
The fight dissolves between us like salt in flame. Her fingers fist into my shirt, tugging me down, trembling against the heat of me. My hands find her waist, grip tight, anchoring us both.
“Then come here,” she whispers. “Come all the way in.”
We fall together.
It’s not graceful. It’s not gentle. We crash—two storms colliding in flesh and breath and need. The stone beneath us is cold, but our bodies are fire, scraping, burning, clawing toward something neither of us knows how to name.
She tastes like blood and wind and desperation. Her mouth opens under mine with a hunger I feel deep in my bones. Her tongue tangles with mine, her breath catching when I suck her bottom lip between my teeth.
This isn’t love. It’s something wilder. Older. It’s survival carved into sinew. It’s the howl in my chest when she moans my name.
I shove her cloak off her shoulders and it falls in a heap behind her. My fingers fumble the ties of her shirt, too rough, too eager. She gasps when the laces snap. Her breasts spill into my palms and I groan, burying my face in her throat.
“Gods, River…” My voice breaks on her skin.
She arches into me, her nails clawing at my belt. “Off,” she hisses. “Take it off—now.”
I obey. Leather straps fall. My shirt rips. Her hands are everywhere—over the planes of my chest, my arms, my stomach. Her fingers trace the old scars etched across my skin like ancient runes.
“You’re… so fucking huge,” she breathes.
I grin against her neck, licking the line of her jaw. “You’re not even seeing the best part yet.”
