Page 48 of Hearts Lost

“Always,” Aloserin replies, with a wicked grin.

Stars, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look this happy. There’s something almost playful about the naked sensuality of that smile. When he’d first appeared through the portal in Princess Elanerill’s chamber, I would have said Aloserin was a man who’d never even heard of the concept of playful.

I follow him to the base of the waterfall, rubbing my hands over my arms. The stone beside the falls is rough and water-slicked, uneven enough to climb easily. Aloserin takes off his boots and the little pack he’s made out of his cloak, with his sword strapped to the top, and lays them both down on the stones lining the river’s bank. Then he turns and kisses me so deeply my head spins, and I could almost swear I can see the stars.

By the time I’ve caught my breath, Aloserin is halfway up the cliff face, moving with casual, easy confidence. The waterfall is wide but not very tall, and he makes the final scramble up the stone wall with ease. There’s a moment when he vanishes over the lip of the cliff and fear rises up inside me like darkness swallowing the sun, but then he reappears, waving his arm.

“— don’t— anything—” he calls, the roar of the water swallowing most of his words.

I wave my arms back at him. The violet light and fanning rainbows of water silhouette his beautiful body, his tangled dark hair, and his easy smile. He looks like someone else, like a man who’d spent his life climbing cliffs and exploring forests instead of fighting to hide his smile.

He turns toward the river, then begins to step gingerly across the lip of the waterfall until he reaches a dry stone rising above the center of the falls, the only place where the water plunges directly into the river below. Aloserin leans over, stares into the swirling pool beneath him, and then turns to me with an enormous grin.

He’s going to jump.

“You’re a madman,” I scream, although I’m certain he won’t hear me.

He waves like he’s agreeing with me, then twists his hands in the hem of his shirt. I cheer as loudly as I can as he starts to lift his shirt, and he turns back to me with an absolutely wicked look in his eyes. As I watch, Aloserin peels his shirt up and over his chest with painful, exquisite slowness. When the dark fabric reaches his shoulders, he spins, showing me his back, and wiggles his hips as the shirt comes over his head.

Oh. My. Stars. He’s stripping for me. The Acting Captain of the Royal Guard for the Kingdom of the Fall is standing on the top of a waterfall and doing a striptease. For me.

I scream and cheer like my life depends on it. Aloserin bumps his hips to the side, stretches his hand over the patch of dry stone, and lets his shirt fall to the ground. He turns to meet my gaze over the curve of his naked shoulder, giving me a look that could start a damned forest fire, and his hands drop to his waist.

“Yeah!” I scream at him. “Take it off!”

He starts to slide his pants down over the curve of his exquisite ass, wiggling his hips the whole time and keeping his smoldering dark eyes pinned on me. And oh, I am going to fuck this man so hard when he gets down here. He has no idea.

His pants slide down further, revealing the tight muscles of his thighs, and then he’s kicking his legs out of the pants and turning toward me, completely naked, as hard as the stones surrounding him, and utterly, unforgivably gorgeous.

And then Aloserin’s back stiffens like he’s been shot. The color drains from his face as he spins around, dips down, and grabs the bundle of clothes he’d just so delightfully peeled from his body. He stumbles off the rock and out of sight. The world turns very, very cold.

“Aloserin!” I scream.

There’s no answer but the roar of water falling over stone. I’m spinning toward the cliff, toward him, but the air has turned to mud and I can’t move fast enough. It’s like a nightmare; everything around me is suddenly very sharp, very precise, and utterly frozen.

I reach the cliff and start pulling myself up, my hands and legs bashing the rock, stones splitting my skin. I’m gulping for air as the roar of the waterfall pounds inside my skull, mixing with the dull thud of my own pulse and the agony of my fear, until the humming buzz of the air around me starts to sound like… voices.

“Aloserin!” I scream again.

The voices ebb, then flow over me once more. It could be the chatter of the river. It could be my own mind, desperately adding meaning to something, anything. My arms tremble as I pull myself up the water-slicked stones, bashing my knee yet again on a jagged rock, and then I can finally see trees at the top of the waterfall.

My foot scrapes against slick stone, and for one horrible, dizzying moment I think I’m going to fall. Then my toes find some purchase, and I shove myself up and over the lip, my chest aching, my vision blurred, my scraped knee screaming at me.

And there’s Aloserin, holding the bundle of clothes clasped tight against his waist, staring at me with hard eyes and pursed lips, like he’s never seen me before. And behind him—

My gut lurches as I push myself up to my knees. There’s the man who was on the bed when I came through the portal, Captain Orryen, and there’s Princess Elanerill, King Grathgore’s heir. The woman I was guarding the day everything in my world changed. There’s the magician from the Kingdom of the Fall, Lythienne, and beside her the man with the tattered ears, and beside him—

Stars and moon. The entire world tilts sideways. Because that really is Lady Arryn Damoira from my world, from the Royal Court of the Kingdom of the Summer, the utterly boring, proper Lady Arryn who belonged to Prince Folwynn and always said the right thing, always did the right thing. And now she’s here, in the void, and she’s watching me with a dagger in her fist.

Slowly, very slowly, my eyes trace the crowd of people surrounding Aloserin.

They are all the people I betrayed. All the people I tried to kill with that damned silver sphere I sent into the teleportation hub, buoyed by my hatred, exploding into the brilliant white light that somehow sent me and Aloserin into the void.

For a heartbeat, I think about stepping backward. I could slide over this cliff and land on the unforgiving stone next to Aloserin’s boots and the neat little packet he’d made of his cloak. Because the way they’re all staring at me—

They know what I did. They all know exactly what I did.

Something cracks deep inside my chest. I can’t look at Aloserin, even as my heart cries out with just how desperately I’d wanted to tell him, just how close I’d come to spilling the truth about everything, about my sister and King Grathgore and what I’d done to buy her freedom.

I wanted to tell you, I think as I force my gaze up to meet Aloserin’s dark eyes. I wanted to, but I didn’t. And now it’s too late.

“Ithronel,” Aloserin says. His voice is as flat and cold as the snow that blankets his kingdom. “I won’t let them hurt you.”

He shifts forward on the stones, and then he’s holding his hand out to me, his palm up, his fingers spread wide. Something flutters inside my chest, something dangerously close to hope. I glance backward, to the forest and river and those dancing, golden flecks of light, and for one shimmering moment, one instant frozen in time, I have a choice.

But then I turn back to Aloserin, pulled by something so deep and strong it feels like it couldn’t possibly have come from inside me, like it must have been a part of the world before I was born and it will last until the stars fall from the sky. He steps forward, and I reach for him. My hand wraps around his.

Magic hits me, swelling from the place where our bodies touch. Yanking me under. Fear threads through my body, pulling my muscles tight, but already it’s fading, falling, swept away.

And the world goes dark.