She did, with difficulty, like peeling herself from the deepest, most peaceful sleep. Kai’s eyes were the first thing she found. They were the brightest comfort, the green of them intense among the hazel, new leaves scattered in a sunlit clearing. They were rounded too—worried? She tried for a reassuring smile, and felt her lips tilt lopsidedly. She felt like she’d downed an entire jug of floral wine in one sitting. She felt disoriented and disjointed, shattered and made whole again.
She felt … wonderful.
“Kai,” she slurred, eyes fluttering dreamily shut. “That was—”
“Adeline,” he said, gentle but firm. He cupped her face, holding her gaze to his. “I need you to sit up for me, love. I need you to take a look around. Can you manage?”
She gave a stilted shake of her head where it rested on his shoulder. She didn’t really want to move, but also—
“My hand’s stuck,” she said aloud.
Kai looked up, and she watched a frown knot his brow as he took her trapped wrist in his hand. She’d never been one forfrowny men before she’d met Kai. Beauty was in a smile, she’d always thought; happiness was the loveliest thing in the world, the only thing one could ever want or hope for. But Kai’s beauty was not in his happiness; not only. It was in the depth of everything he felt. It was in his capacity to feel. He felt so very much, always, and he was so … so very, painfully, achingly lovely for every frown and smile and scowl and smirk and—
“You’re beautiful,” she told him firmly.
His chest heaved beneath her, and she felt more than heard the shock of incredulous laughter steal through him.
“Thank you,” he said, amusement thrumming beneath each word, before he dragged her hand down from the mirror and laid it against his shoulder, beside her head. “There, you’re free. Do you see what’s on your wrist?”
She squinted at it; it looked like a length of green twine. No—a vine?
“Is that a plant?”
“Look around,” he said again.
And slowly, pressing shaky palms to Kai’s chest, Adeline eased herself up and turned her head. Shock stiffened her limbs and cleared her senses, snatching her breath from her. It was—
It was a forest.
They were sitting in a forest. But that couldn’t be right; there was still the counter beneath her knees; the mirror still gleamed beneath a curtain of dark ivy, reflecting fragments of her own thunderstruck face back at her. Pink flower petals had caught in the mussed peaks of Kai’s hair, their deep pink bright against his dark waves, and when Adeline tilted her head back, a hundred nycta flowers fluttered at her in a canopy over their heads.Slowly, she returned her gaze to Kai and found him gazing at her with deep and undisguised awe.
“Did I—”
She choked on the absurdity of her unasked question, but Kai just stared steadily back at her.
“Did I do this?”
“Yes,” he said, barely above a whisper. He reached for the counter and plucked something from the soft tangle of green; a bloom with white, velvet petals, a burst of sunshine yellow at its centre. He tucked it behind her ear, then trailed his fingers down her jaw and took her chin, tilting her face to his. His eyes, when he locked her in his gaze, were both soft and blazing, full of awe and fierce pride.
“Adeline, you’ve Wielded magic.”
Chapter Sixteen
Kai
He was reeling, even now. Almost drunk on that second-hand surge of power as they stumbled through the open hallways of the Imperial palace.
Kai had felt it coursing through her body as he held her; pure, ancient, boundless magic pouring out of Adeline in the same moment that he poured himself into her. He hadn’t understood what was happening at first; only that he was coming harder and longer than he had in his entire life. He’d thought she was coming too, unravelling again just moments after her last orgasm—had felt some misplaced pride at that, if he was honest with himself. But then a featherlight touch exploded around his legs, his back, his neck, and as his own climax ebbed, he finally became aware of the shift in the dim light and the density in the air.
Life itself exploded from beneath Adeline’s palm, green spreading like a thorny, velvet flood in every direction, petals unfurling and vines snaking. She had clung to him, blind with power, utterly senseless to everything but its all-consuming rush, and Mother help him, he had been incapable of anything but to sit back and marvel at her. Her beautiful face was lined with ecstasy and lit by the fractured flare of green that his pendant cast between her fingers as she clutched at him.
And the thought had dawned on him, though somewhat shadowed by her sheer brilliance, that her grasp on the Adhlian pendant had loaned her a momentary power. He hadn’t yet had a private moment to test the potency of Daithí’s gift to him, but seeing Adeline overtaken by magic, his veins throbbed with that familiar thirst, that ache for the power that had once lived in his blood. It was not the same hollow feeling it had once been. It was a keen edge of eagerness and excitement. He couldsharethis with her. She would know now what it was to feel that ineffable connection to Adhlas at the core of your own mortal being.
But when it was over, Adeline took some time longer to return to herself. In his own few moments of clarity, he hadn’t stopped to consider how she might react; her initial shock was understandable. What had thrown him was the quiet, simmering rage that swept in to swallow that shock.
She had climbed off of him, her voice so hoarse and hollow he could only just comprehend the few words she uttered beneath her breath;The fucking flowers.
She’d fought to unearth her dress from a tangle of weeds on the tiled floor, and Kai had done up its bodice while she stood with her fists so tightly compressed he worried she would break a finger. Adeline said nothing else; didn’t seemcapableof speaking, her jaw so tight it was nearly sealed shut. Had shenot stood and waited for him to dress himself, he wouldn’t have known she wanted him to follow as she strode from the powder room. He struggled to keep up with her, long though his legs may be; in her fury, she moved like a river beneath a storm, so rapid and wild there was nothing to do but let the furious waters braid you into their tide. She was a force of her own.
