Page 246 of Season Warriors & Wolves

Like that, I almost suffocated the man with a shower of kisses, everywhere. I stopped for a breath, and he smiled up at me, my own face mimicked his happiness. “Heal quickly,” I said over his lips. “So I can give you black haired babies for you to worry about.”

“You know,” he said, throwing off all the cloths filled with medicine that were all over his body. “The pain was never that bad. Felt more like a pinch.”

I bit his shoulder until he groaned from true pain and then picked all the medicine cloths to neatly lay them back on his wounded skin. “Fool.”

He kissed me so hungrily that I had to hold back from climbing his still broken body. “Do not tempt me.”

“Heal first.”

He cupped a hand over my cheek. “Then you must also heal first.”

“I’m not wounded, darling, I told you that the magic healed me.”

His hand dropped down to rest on my chest. “Here.” Then on top of my head. “And here.”

“Kil—”

“Then…then we have black haired babies who will worry us both to death.”

I pressed my face on the crook of his neck and just held him, trying not to be too happy that I could simply do that again. “Alright.”

He sighed. “How is the world?”

My ceiling glistened, reflecting the light rain and thunder outside. “Alive. It is alive.”

My father was gone.

He was finally gone.

A laugh burst out of me.

And another.

Many others.

As did tears.

So many tears.

Yet no cries.

Only tears.

Kilian pressed his brow to mine, his eyes tightly shut while he held me in the midst of the many realisations. In the midst of relief.

Relief was strange. Like a lock. It had held so much behind.

I could—I could do, think, hope, wish, expect, want, need, crave, desire anything. Anything without fearing it might be the last thing I did, thought, hoped, wished, wanted, needed, craved, desired.

There was a future.

Many nights.

So many nights I could hold him like this.

Without fearing.

Chapter fifty-six