Page 27
“Vorren!”
“I see them.”
Three more drop from the arches ahead of him, black-masked and silent, curved blades catching what little torchlight reaches this deep. Vorren doesn’t wait for them to organize. Nightfall opens a killing arc that doesn’t slow for the two trying to flank him, catching the nearest across the ribs and reversing into the second while the first is still falling, and I put my back against his without deciding to — some things don’t need coordinating. Just two bodies that have learned, over the last handful of days, exactly where the other one’s blind spots are.
I’ve fought at his side twice now, and both times the same strange certainty settles into me mid-fight — that I don’t need to watch my own back anymore, because his is already there. Ash-gray runes catch the light along a fourth mask closing on my left, blade already coated dark with something that isn’t blood. Everything about the way he moves says patience, the kind that comes from training a man from childhood to erase instead of fight fair. I don’t give him the chance to use it. I close the distance myself, inside his reach before he expects it, and put my blade through the gap where his mask meets his collar.
A sixth drops from directly above me.
I see the blade’s angle before I see the man attached to it, and I know, with the flat certainty of someone who’s spent a lifetime reading danger in stone before it collapses, I won’t get my own knife up in time.
Vorren doesn’t warn me. He simply steps into the blade’s path.
Steel that was aimed at my spine opens a line across his ribs instead, deep enough that I hear his breath catch even over the sound of the last Ashbound finally hitting the ground dead. He doesn’t stop moving. Finishes the man who cut him with a single economical strike, and only then does the silence catch up to us — total, sudden, the ringing quiet that follows violence loud enough to fill a space this size.
I’m shaking.
Not from fear. I know fear, and this isn’t it — this is something colder, sharper, my hands refusing to hold still as I press a strip torn from his own shirt against a wound that came within an inch of being mine instead. Blood’s already soaking through faster than I’d like, dark against torchlight, and I make myself focus on the mechanics of the bandage instead of the half-second replay running behind my eyes on a loop I can’t seem to stop. He watches me work with an expression that’s gone flatly furious, and it takes me a full breath to understand the fury isn’t aimed at the men who did this.
It’s aimed at himself, for not moving fast enough to stop it from costing him anything at all.
“You didn’t warn me.” My voice cracks somewhere in the middle. “You just took it.”
“I wasn’t going to explain myself with a blade already in the air, Lyessa.”
“You could have died. We already had this fight, Vorren. In the plaza, before the library. I thought I lost it fairly.”
“You did lose it.” No apology in it, though something gentler moves under the words than there was in the plaza. “I’m not relitigating it. I’m telling you it isn’t a fight that ends once and stays ended. It’s one I intend to keep having, and keep losing, for as long as there’s a blade somewhere out there with your name on it.” He catches my wrist before I can pull it back, presses it flat against his chest instead, and I feel his heart going harder than a man who’s just been cut has any business letting it. “I’m not asking you to agree with me this time. I already know you won’t. I’m telling you so you stop being surprised by it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s not meant to be fair. It’s meant to be true.” His free hand comes up to my jaw, tilting my face toward his with a gentleness that doesn’t match the blood still drying along his ribs. “I’ve spent my whole life protecting things without understanding why they mattered. I understand now, and I’m not interested in unlearning it because the answer frightens you.” His palm stays cupped there, rough and certain. “Tomorrow. Next week. However many times it comes to that choice, I already know which one I’m making. I’m not asking permission for it anymore.”
Neither of us says anything sensible after that.
I kiss him first — hard, certain, half relief and half a fury of my own that hasn’t found anywhere else to go. He makes a sound against my mouth that isn’t quite pain and isn’t quite anything gentle, and when we stumble back into the shelter of a collapsed archway, there’s nothing careful left in me, or in him, to spend. This isn’t the sanctuary. There’s no fire, no slow hour to learn each other by inches — just his mouth crashing into mine hard enough to bruise, pinning me back against cold stone like he needs the wall as much as he needs proof we’re both still breathing.
“Careful,” I manage, half warning and half a lie, because I don’t want careful from him right now any more than he wants it from me.
“I’m done being careful tonight. I nearly watched you die an hour ago.”
Good. I don’t want it either.
What follows is rougher than the sanctuary in every way that matters — blood drying on us both, his grip hard enough at my hip to leave a mark I’ll still feel tomorrow, both of us chasing proof that we’re alive more than we’re chasing tenderness. He doesn’t ask if I want it slower. I don’t want it slower. When he finally says my name, it isn’t affection so much as a debt he’s collecting on, and I come apart with his name tearing out of my own throat in return, and feel him follow me over that same edge only seconds later.
We stay tangled up against the same stone for a long moment afterward, still breathing like the fight never actually ended.
Afterward, sitting in the dark with my back against his chest, his heartbeat finally slowing under my ear, he says it low, as the words cost him something to let go of.
“I’ve never wanted anything the way I want to keep you.”
I don’t tell him to be careful with a claim that size. I’ve had enough of careful for one night, and considerably more than enough of pretending I want him to be anything less than exactly what he already is.
“Then mean it.”
“I do.” His voice doesn’t waver on it, not even slightly, and my shoulders finally drop for the first time since a blade nearly found my spine an hour ago.
We find the murals an hour later, deeper along a passage the map marks only as toward the Forgotten King, and I stop walking the moment torchlight catches the first panel.
