Page 123 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

“Aurienne,” he said breathlessly.

She smiled against his mouth.

He did not smile back.

“We must make what we can of what’s left to us,” said Aurienne.

The rain turned to deluge. She stood upon the tips of her toes, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him hard.

The first fork of lightning flashed across the sky.

He kissed her back with a desperate thirst, with the agonised certainty that it was the last time. His mouth found her mouth, her eyes, her forehead. His hands passed over her possessively, wretchedly. As though holding her to him could make her his.

The inevitable end pained Aurienne more than she’d thought it would; it scalded at her heart. She had protected herself so much—why did this still hurt?

She wanted to be closer to him. Whole with him. This would be the last time.

His mouth was all over her neck. He paused when her hands found his shirt buttons. He looked at her with a gaze underlit with adoration. Want. Darkling despair.

Gods, she could love him, despite despite despite.

She pulled off his shirt. It fell into the wild surf. Another lightning strike. The world flashed lurid white.

Were they going to die here? The risk was delicious; Aurienne swallowed it amid gasps of thunder-bruised air.

He pulled off her dress and fell to his knees before her. That was what veneration was, in the end. Wanting. Giving. She dug her hands into his hair. His tongue was on her, tasting the salt of her and the sea. She gasped; water fell into her eyes and on her lips; the atmosphere was almost unbreathable with rain and brine and sweat.

With every building wave of her orgasm, there was a great crash of waves and a rumble of thunder. When, panting, she reached her peak, lightning flashed in the skies and behind her eyelids.

Legs shaking, she slipped down onto him. The air was stuttering, explosive, like them. This was a failure of restraint, this was forbidden, this was the greater sin: the sky was finally falling.

She rode him under the rain, her shoulders glistening with wet, the seas curling at her thighs, her hands in his drenched hair. His fingers dug into her, bruising, memorizing. Rivulets ran down his throat, hischest, over pitted lines of scars. Her lips memorised, too. It was the last time.

Storm-hearted, trembling, they made love under a sky uncreated, groaning with its own carnage, in a sea broken and blinding. Was it them who shook, or was it the thunder rolling through them? In their veins, was it blood or lightning?

She pressed her forehead to his. The grey-black of the storm was in his eyes. The threshold between love and hate was somewhere between them, and between wanting and giving, and holding on and letting go, all of these things two sides of a coin spinning so fast it was a sphere, a mad oscillation, everything collapsing into its opposite. The dark sky was bifurcated by lightning. They held each other at this convergence of black and white, of night split by light, of light choked again and again by darkness. There was no longer a cadence to the waves or to their movements, only triumphant shakes and spumes, only life and death in the exchange of breaths.

Lightning struck.

She shattered, and so did the sky.

The storm spent itself. Aurienneand Mordaunt stumbled back to the relative dryness of the fisherman’s hut. He spread his cloak upon the sand for them to sit on, and she drew hers over them for warmth. He managed to start a fire with damp driftwood.

The fire dried salty skin, sodden skirts, and wave-roughened hair. They shared the snacks in Aurienne’s satchel: dried meat, biscuits, chocolate.

Mordaunt held a fistful of sand and let it run out of his hands, marvelling boyishly at the feeling. Every grain of sand, he said. Incredible. His torpraxia was completely gone.

He was healed.

And it was over.

They fell asleep leaning on each other, under galaxies so bright they cast shadows upon the beach.

A few hours later, an unfamiliar seith, blustery and cool, pricked at Aurienne’s tacn. It was the Leyfarer’s deofol, which took the shape of a flying fox, suspended upside down in midair over the ashes of last night’s fire.

Ruain’s deofol beat her wings until she was right way up and asked, “How’s the form? Are we still alive?”

“We are,” yawned Aurienne.