The power surges through us as we strip each other naked, the shadow and light tendrils finding each other, touching and feeling every inch of our shared skin, giving and receiving all at once. Ronan lifts me to him and then lowers me down to the altar, his light tendrils binding my hands to the stone, spreading my legs open as he kneels before me.
He wastes no time. His tongue tastes the flesh between my legs, his shadow tendrils parting them, opening me to him. He reaches up with one of his light tendrils and opens my mouth, and I suck it as he sucks on my clit, the tendril warm and soft, the feel of it unmistakably like him.
He teases my entrance with a tendril of shadow, and my back arches off of the altar, begging him to take me. I strain against the shadows holding me down, wrapping my legs around him until he pulls them apart with his shadows, opening me to give me what I want.
He plunges his shadow inside me, and it’s cool and smooth as he fucks me, filling me and stretching me as he rubs his light tendrils over my nipples, his hands gripping my hips as he devours me with his mouth.
I cry out as he pulls the shadow from within me and replaces it with light, the sudden change in sensation sending heat down my back as my core tightens around him.
When it feels like I can’t hold on any longer, he switches back to the shadow, and I throw my head back, hitting the altar painlessly as his light cradles it. My release is coming fast, but I don’t want just his magic inside me when I come, and he knows it.
He breaks away from my clit like it physically pains him to do so, releasing the shadows that restrain me so he can lay me back on the altar and climb on top. “I’d make you come a dozen times right here if I could,” he whispers in my ear as his fingers pinch my nipple. I moan and writhe underneath him, my hips pressing up to his hard length. “But I’m not sure that’s in the prophecy.”
I can feel what he means. We’re meant to come together as one, and as close as I am, it’s not going to take much. “Please fill me, Ronan.”
He moans and lowers his lips to my neck as he pushes himself inside of me. “Oh, gods. This is…this feels like the end of the world.” He closes his eyes tight, his neck arching with the pleasure of being inside me again after so long. “Gods, I’ve missed you so much. I could die right here.”
“Not yet,” I say. I pull him to me by my own shadows, running them down his back and onto his ass, pushing him into me deeper. “I need this.”
“Sylvie.” He thrusts within me, finding the rhythm he knows I like best. I rise up to meet him, our bodies fully entwined, connected on every level. I pull myself up and push him down until I’m on top of him, riding him, my shadows holding him, his light holding me, until my back arches, his thrusts become frantic, and I throw my head back into a sky on fire.
We cry out as we come, Ronan pulling himself up to hold me to him, our bodies releasing and pulling and tearing at each other, and there is nothing else in this world, nothing else in the universe but our bliss, our bond, the golden thread that ties us together.
And the world, as if in answer, as if knowing it isn’t needed when we are all we need, falls away.
The sound fades, and the world turns white.
Chapter Forty-Eight
We are naked and entwined in an empty space. There’s nothing but white as far as the eye can see. Even the altar beneath us has turned from blood red back to white once more.
Ronan pants into my shoulder, his body covered with a layer of sweat. I breathe him in, trying to savor the smell of him, but there’s no smell here.
There’s nothing here at all.
“Are we dead?” Ronan whispers. He looks around without removing himself from me, and I cling to him as I stare into the void that surrounds us.
“This doesn’t look like the underworld.” Vahlo’s domain is meant to be a dark version of ours. A nighttime voyage down the river, not a stark white sky in a plane of nothingness.
I pull myself up, releasing Ronan from me, and the world falls back in, but not around us.
Below us.
We’re miles above the surface, miles above the highest we’ve ever flown on Kira. So high that we can see the curve of the world, the altar floating in the air beside us.
“Whatisthis place?” Ronan mutters.
“Do you feel that?” The power is still there, but instead of surging wildly through my veins, it hums gently in the background. It’s no longer beyond my grasp. It’s fully within my control.
Our control.
“We can…we can change things.”
Ronan pushes the power down, and it soars through the clouds, gliding over the surface. My eyes track the movement, drawn by the feel of it. It’s a way of thinking that’s beyond my comprehension, an intuitive understanding of the magic that binds us and flows through the world.
In the mountains to the west, he finds a rock—an enormous boulder the size of our cottage—and picks it up, dropping it in the valley of the next mountain over.
“Oh, gods,” I say, and I feel the power flow through me. Thisisthe power of the gods in our hands. “We can do anything.”
