Page 153 of Feralheart

I’d never had that. What I’d had with Aristus was obedience, and I’d called it love because no one had ever shown me the difference.

And then, buried deep, I found one last thing.

She wanted me, though not for my wealth or status or even a way out of Shaleside.

She wanted me. Fenian. Fen. The man who ignored her for all of her life, only seeing her finally when she teased him after spilling water on his boots.

In every encounter, she’d issued a challenge.

Is peace what you felt when you bonded with Aristus?

No, it was not.

Wanting her had lived in me since before I knew the word for it. To learn she’d been drowning in the same feeling didn’t feel like winning.

This felt like theft.

I’d been handed something I hadn’t earned and couldn’t give back.

The bead sat on my tongue, shrinking, and I understood it now. Air bound into a pearl, enough for one. You breathed it or you gave it to the other. You couldn’t do both.

My own body had gone slack, the last of what she’d spent bleeding out. She’d given me the breath and kept the drowning.

I’d held onto things my whole life. It had made me a weapon and a stranger in every room I walked into.

I pushed off the lake bed and swam to my slack, sinking body and pressed this mouth to my own and pushed the pearl inside.

Her eyelids snapped open, and she breathed.

While I embraced drowning again.

For the first time I could remember, I’d given a thing away and wanted nothing in exchange.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

ERADIN

The pearl came back to me smaller than I’d given it.

We’d worked out how we were going to do this without a word, because words were a mouthful of lake down here. One of us breathed while the other went still and gray, and then we traded, mouth to mouth, buying each other another handful of seconds. Him. Me. Him. Me. A rhythm you could set a heartbeat to, if either of our hearts had been where they belonged.

It should’ve meant nothing. A trick to keep two bodies alive. But somewhere in the tenth time or twelfth passing, his mouth on mine stopped being a mechanism and started being his mouth, and the breath I took off it carried more than air.

I told myself it was the drowning. Drowning did strange things to a person.

I didn’t quite believe myself.

Between passes, we hunted the dome. I dragged Fenian’s hands along the clear curve of it while my own body worked the far side, methodical, like he did everything.

We found nothing but cleks of clear, unbroken nothing, with the dead standing witness, the light too far above to matter, and our dragons still trying to batter their way through.

During one pass, I felt something new. I was driven deeper, into something unexpected buried far inside him.

Longing.

Directed at…

No, that couldn’t be right.