His pulse beats against my fingertips. Fast at first—the rhythm of combat, of rage, of destruction without end. Then slower. Evening out by degrees as the seconds pass.
I’m anchoring him.
The realization surfaces with quiet certainty. The same way I anchor death, make endings stick—I’m anchoring him. Grounding him. Giving him something solid to return to.
The Anchor hums beneath my skin, reaching toward him without my direction. Not to hurt. Not to heal. To connect.
His free hand moves.
I expect him to push me away. Expect distance, rejection, the instinct reasserting boundaries the rest of him won’t acknowledge.
His fingers brush my injured shoulder instead.
Light. Barely there. Tracing the damage with a touch so gentle, it might be imagination. The contact sends heat through my body that has nothing to do with dragonfire.
“You’re hurt.”
“It’s minor.” True enough. A bruise, maybe cracked bone. Nothing that will kill me.
“You should have stayed behind the altar.”
“You were tearing yourself apart.”
His head turns. Not fully—not enough to face me—but enough that I see his profile in the dim light filtering through the collapsed ceiling. His features are carved from tension. His eyes still carry the remnants of fury, banked but not extinguished.
“I was killing the thing that killed our only lead.”
“You were killing yourself.” My fingers tighten on his wrist. His pulse jumps beneath my touch. “The wounds, the poison, the fire burning you from inside—you would have destroyed yourself along with it.”
Silence.
His breathing steadies further. The heat radiating from him drops from scorching to merely uncomfortable. The violence recedes another degree.
“Would that matter?”
The question arrives stripped of inflection. Genuine curiosity masquerading as casual inquiry.
“Yes.” I don’t hesitate. Don’t soften. Don’t pretend uncertainty. “It would matter.”
FOURTEEN
SOREIA
Idon’t release his wrist.
He doesn’t ask me to.
We stand in the ruins of the shrine—surrounded by death, covered in blood, breathing air thick with old incense and fresh destruction—and neither of us moves. The contact holds. His wrist warm beneath my fingers. My grip on his skin.
The informant’s body lies cooling near the eastern wall. Whatever knowledge he carried died with him. The gods won that round. Eliminated another source, closed another door, forced us further into ignorance.
Anger would be reasonable. The loss of those answers should feel like a wound.
What I feel instead is the certainty that the man beside me would burn the world to cinders to protect me.
Dangerous thought. Stupid thought. True thought.
His head turns farther. Enough now that I see his eyes fully—those impossible eyes that have kept vigil through my darkest hours, tracked my breathing, placed themselves at the center of every danger.
