Her eyes shine, wet and unblinking.
“I have loved you since you defied me in that tent in front of my entire crew and didn’t flinch when I tried to scare you. I loved you through corruption, distance, and timelines that tried to erase us. I will love you after this battle, after whatever comes next, and after every version of this story runs out of pages.”
I lower myself to one knee.
The aurora flares overhead, violet, green, and blue, filling the chamber with light.
“Marry me,” I say. “Not because I decided it. Not because the universe arranged it. Because you want to. Because I am asking, on my knees. Marry me because I am yours and you are mine and I want the rest of our lives to start the moment you say yes.”
She drops to her knees in front of me. Takes my face in her hands and kisses me.
“Yes,” she says against my mouth. “Obviously, yes. A thousand times, across every timeline, yes.”
I make a sound against her lips that is half laugh, half something deeper, and I pull her against me so hard the breath leaves her body. The flowers on the walls pulse brighter, and the moss beneath us glows gold.
“I want you,” I say against her jaw. “Right here. Right now.”
“Then take me.”
I stand and pull her to her feet. I touch the dress, and I stop.
The way the fabric clings to her body in lines that are technically modest and functionally ruinous. I have spent the last hour holding her on a dance floor while whispering exactly what I intended to do to her, and now that the moment is here, Ifind that I want to slow down. I want to give this the attention it deserves.
“This fucking dress,” I growl, running my fingers along the neckline where the fabric meets her collarbone.
The living fabric responds to my touch the way everything in the Verdance responds, by reading intent. The material parts where my fingers press, splitting along seams that were invisible a moment ago, falling open across her shoulder and down her arm. I follow the opening with my mouth, kissing the bare skin as it appears, and the contrast between the warm fabric and my mouth makes her shiver against me.
I move to the other shoulder. The dress parts again, and I take my time with this side too, tracing a line from her shoulder to her collarbone with my lips. Then down. The fabric splits along the center of her back, and the dress slides forward, and I catch it at her waist with both hands while I press my mouth to the back of her neck.
“I could keep you like this for hours,” I murmur against her spine. “Half dressed, shaking under my mouth.”
“You could try.”
I let the dress fall. It pools around her feet on the luminous moss. She’s standing in nothing but the light of the chamber and her marks, which glow gold against her skin like a second layer of clothing that I intend to worship with my hands and my mouth and every other part of me that belongs to her.
I walk around her. Slow. Taking her in from every angle, cataloguing every line and curve and golden mark with the focused precision of a man who has crossed realities to get back to this body, this woman, this exact configuration of skin and light.
“Turn around,” I say.
She turns. The pool is behind her, the steam rising in thin curls through the aurora light.
I strip. Fast, nothing performative. The suit comes off in pieces that I don’t bother tracking where they land, because there is exactly one thing in this chamber that warrants my attention and she is standing in front of me glowing like something the Verdance made specifically to destroy me.
I walk her backward. Step by step, gripping her waist, guiding her toward the pool. The moss is warm and soft under our bare feet. The steam thickens around us. When her heels touch the edge of the water, I lift her and carry her in.
The water is hot. Not scalding but deep, aching heat that sinks into the muscles and loosens things I didn’t know were tight. It comes to her waist when I set her down. I stay behind her, my chest against her back, my arms around her waist, and the water laps at us in slow warm waves.
“The spring is fed by the Heartwood’s root system,” I tell her, my mouth against her ear. “The water is infused with Bloom magic. It heightens sensation. Makes the skin more sensitive.”
“Did Thalia tell you that too?”
“I am choosing to believe she mentioned it in a tactical context and not a parental one.”
She laughs, and the sound echoes off the curved roots above us, and the flowers on the walls pulse in response. I turn her to face me. The water is between us, hot and silky, and my hands slide up her sides beneath the surface. Wherever my fingers press, the Bloom-infused water intensifies the touch, amplifying the sensation until I can feel her whole body tighten. She gasps, and the sound goes straight through me.
“Feel that?” I say. “The water makes everything more.”
“I noticed.”
