Page 205

He nudged me deeper with his massive frame. Gods, he was magnificent. My fingers buzzed with the need to remember as I slipped them beneath his shirt and ran my palms over the soft trail of hair across his stomach and chest. His chuckle warmed my ribs. Aren lifted his arms, caught the back of his collar, and yanked the shirt over his head.

Then I was in his arms, thighs locked around his hips, head spinning, ears buzzing, heat flooding every inch of skin pressed to his chest. Aren carried us into the spring and slowly lowered us beneath the warmth until the water reached our shoulders, glorious heat easing the week’s worth of grime from my skin.

Even wrapped around him, it wasn’t enough.

“This is a bad idea,” he reiterated, but his fingers were roaming, exploring; his mouth doing the same.

“Terrible,” I agreed as he tore the bra over my head.

“One lapse in control⁠—”

“Catastrophic.”

“Goddamn,” he growled, the word all agonized heat. Need beyond this realm or the next. Our souls reached for each other. Aren pulled his mouth from mine and eased me back to float, his hands scraping down my bare torso, my ass, then my thighs where they clamped around his hips. He folded over me, lavishing me with gentle caresses from desperate lips—over my collarbone, sternum, breasts. “Fucking missed you. It’s like I haven’t taken a full breath in⁠—”

“Nearly five months,” I finished.

He nodded and settled his face against my skin as though memorizing the cadence of my heart.

Gods, I wanted to bottle this moment and hide it somewhere time couldn’t touch.

I opened my eyes and craned my neck toward the gentle giant staring down at me with enough longing to crack my heart clean out of my chest.

Aren looked at me like a starving man at his first meal, a sailor at the first strip of land after months at sea, an acolyte before his god. Reverence still glimmering in those winter-blues he lifted me from the water with effortless strength and set me on my feet as his mouth found mine again.

One hand cradled the back of my neck while the other drifted down my spine, across my belly. Lower. My eyes closed as he cupped me and bent to whisper against my ear.

“When we get home, I’m going to lay you across my bed and worship you the way you deserve.” My breath vanished as he slipped a finger inside me and the rest of the world followed. “I’ll memorize every sound you make—” His thumb found my clit beneath the water, a gentle stroke. “—and watch you come undone beneath my hands.” The pressure built, steady and devastating, until my knees trembled. “Again,” he promised. “And again, and again.” His movements grew more deliberate, his free arm pulling me flush against him. “I meant what I said before—” stroke, “—I am unequivocally—” stroke, “irrevocably—” stroke, “in love with you, Miss Green.”

Like a maestro pulling music from strings, Aren shattered me. I clung to him, gasping as pleasure crested through me.

“Mea bona puella,” he chuckled into my hair, holding me steady while tremors threatened my knees. My hand found him beneath the water, but his fingers gently closed around my wrist and drew it away. Rejection pricked sharp through my chest—until he pressed kisses into my palm, then along the veins beneath my skin, each decadent movement holding me captive. “When I finally find release, it’ll be when I can enjoy every inch of you, buried in your cunt, with your name on my lips, dove.”

FORTY

SECRETS ARE BEST WHEN KEPT

BLYTHE

134 days…

The day after the alleged sighting of ‘Solskari magic’ was madness.

Like so many days in the ER, one injury bled into the next—one burned body gave way to keraunoparalysis, Lichtenberg figures, or autonomic dysfunction. Or, like the bastard I wasn’t fast enough to save, fatal cardiac failure.

My fingers traced over the livid feathered pattern on his skin, and I scoffed, shaking my head.

Only one thing left marks like that. This man had met his maker at the end of a lightning strike.

August was getting better. More accurate, certainly.

And the infirmary—chock-full of corpses and souls with the same markings, healers moving in a panic—told me whatever fight Moros started in response to the news had not gone well for my enemy.

How fucked was it that I was almost… relieved when one of the more brutal-looking soldiers succumbed to his injuries? If only because it was one less monster for Grayshell to face?

I wondered, then, if a certain prince of shadows would be back in my room tonight.

He had come to me.