The Falconer (The Falconer #1)

Chapter 37

37

I trail behind Kiaran through the snow-blanketed garden path. I don’t push him for conversation, my thoughts too chaotic for speech. My mind can’t settle between what he means to do and everything he saw twisted up inside my mind.

Flakes of snow kiss my lashes. I blink them away furiously, gritting my teeth against the bite of winter. So many people I’ve cared about end up ashes in my hands. First, my father to illness. Then my mother, ripped violently away. Now Kiaran.

I watch him cross the forge to a carved trunk by the crackling hearth. He flips the iron latch, lifting the heavy lid. Light glints across gleaming metal within.

“Come here.” He gestures without looking up. “I made this for you.”

I drift closer on unwilling feet. “I thought you didn’t care for goodbyes.”

“I’ve never been one for sentimentality.” He keeps his gaze focused on the trunk’s contents. “But the prospect of lifetimes of imprisonment has a way of making even the most pragmatic indulge in frivolities.”

“How morbidly optimistic. Most people prefer a rousing speech or a pat on the back before marching to their doom.” I force a brittle laugh. “But not you.”

The ghost of a smile curves Kiaran’s stern mouth. Even now, that rare softening steals the breath from my lungs. Shatters my heart into glittering shards. Makes me want impossible things—to smooth away the hollows haunting his expression. To patiently peel back the layers of his armour until I discover what’s beneath.

“I wasn’t aware you placed such value in false platitudes and back-patting,” he says.

My next words catch like splintered glass in my throat. “I make exceptions for friends about to entomb themselves for eternity.”

Friends. Such a hollow, inadequate word for this intimacy woven through violence and moonlit confessions. Through secrets spilled across bare skin. Marks and bonds and bodies pressed together.

“Are we friends?” His question comes out softly. Intimately. Like the brush of fingers over my cheek.

No.

The denial rises swiftly and viciously within me.

I don’t want to be friends with you. We are not friends. This glowing mark on my palm, the tangible link between us, is not between friends. What we did last night in the dark—that is not something friends do.

Friends do not strip away armour to find someone’s soft underbelly. Friends do not make me feel like this—raw and exposed, cut open to reveal tender nerves beneath. Undone. Craving.

So I don’t answer him. I say nothing at all. The nothing expands between us, filling the space where my confession should have fallen.

We are not friends.

Kiaran doesn’t respond. Doesn’t push. He gestures to the open trunk instead. An invitation. A diversion.

I drift over on unwilling feet to admire the gleaming breastplate and vambraces nestled carefully in pristine white linen. My breath catches at the armour’s beauty, the intricate sigils etched into the fae metal that seems to shift as if alive. Like starlight and ice—cold and lovely and lethal.

Like him.

“This won’t safeguard you from mental attacks,” Kiaran says. “But wearing it will enhance our bond. You’ll be as strong as me on the battlefield. And you can use it to maintain control of the Fade when I’m gone.”

When I’m gone.

The words land like stones dropped into the still waters of my heart, sending ripples of pain through my composure. I bite my lip so hard I taste copper.

“Help me try it on?”

Kiaran rises slowly to his feet, movements deliberate. Ritualised. His hands make quick work of my coat fastenings, peeling the fabric from my shoulders, baring more of me to searching eyes. I shiver as his knuckles graze my throat, my spine, skimming like a secret caress. Touching me as if savouring each stolen brush of skin on skin. As if I’ve become something ephemeral that will dissolve into smoke between his palms if handled indelicately.

Something already lost to him.

Kiaran takes his time settling each piece of the exquisite armour over my body. His hands trail over my torso, my hips, my thighs as he secures straps and buckles. The gleaming fae metal moulds itself to every curve.

When the last clasp is secured, he steps back. “It suits you.”

Kiaran’s soft words brush my senses. Full of veiled meanings I dare not examine.

Then he takes something else from the trunk—a gleaming metal crossbow.

“Here,” he says. “It’s small enough to wear it easily on your back.”

I bite my lip. “Giving me new toys before you go?”

“Well, you have an unfortunate habit of losing knives by throwing them. I thought I’d give you a projectile weapon. I assume you’ve shot one before?”

“Never one this lovely.” A shaky breath leaves me. “I’ll miss you.” The confession tears itself from my throat.

Kiaran goes utterly still. No longer even breathing. Perhaps waiting for me to snatch back such vulnerability, to hide behind the safety of emotional armour once more.

But I do not take the words back. I make no flimsy excuses or clarifications.

I only grip the table’s edges and wait, exposed by my admission. Braced for whatever response his aloof mask will offer—evasion, rejection, distance. I wait for him to turn the knife lodged deep in my heart with carefully crafted words designed to shred me further. To rip apart these fragile stitches barely holding me together after everything.

I wait for fresh hurt layered onto old scars.

He says nothing at all.

Instead, Kiaran kisses me, his mouth both gentle and fierce on mine. A contradiction, a confession. Kisses me the way I’ve imagined kissing him beneath moonlight on countless nights between sleep and awake when the ghosts have finally subsided. When all that’s left is him putting the pieces of me back together, the mark on my skin, his touch the only tender thing I have left to ground me.

Too soon, Kiaran pulls back, resting his forehead against mine.

His fingers trail down the column of my throat, raising gooseflesh in their wake. He presses his lips to my jaw, my cheek, the corner of my mouth—feather-light things I barely feel through the haze clouding my senses.

“Have I ever told you the vow a fae makes when he pledges himself to another?” Kiaran’s resonant voice shivers through me. His lips brush the shell of my ear, voice dropping to an intimate whisper. “ Aoram dhuit . I will worship thee.”

Something breaks within me. I crush my mouth to his once more, reckless and desperate. Trying to dull the sharp, aching places inside me. Kiaran kisses me back just as fiercely. Exploring, claiming, devouring. In this moment, we are creatures of animal instinct and raw, aching want. Two damaged souls seeking solace.

The lush press of his lips. The teasing flick of his tongue. The hungry sounds torn from his chest. Our mouths move together, intimately acquainted in yearning. Months of this dance between us. Months of fighting, wanting, learning each other, evading. This feels like everything we are. Everything we could be. A beginning and an ending all at once.

In this moment, I’m his. And he’s mine. Nothing else matters.

I soften the kiss. Learning the shape and taste of him, the velvet slide of his tongue tracing my lips. His hands gentle again around my waist. Touching me as though I am at once precious and devastating.

This is devotion—sweet pleas and broken promises shared across breath. I wonder if he can taste my heartbreak on my lips. His kiss is an answer, a benediction, absolution.

Take this with you , I think desperately, fisting my hands in his shirt. Take this kiss. Take every unspoken word, everything I should have told you. Everything I wanted to be for you. Take it all.

The ground suddenly bucks underfoot. I stumble into Kiaran, clinging tighter as shards rain down around us. The lanterns overhead shatter from the violent tremors passing through the earth. Kiaran braces me against him until the shuddering passes a few interminable heartbeats later.

In the quake’s wake, the forge is hushed. Like the held breath between lightning strike and deafening thunder.

Dread pools in my stomach even before Kiaran confirms my worst fears. “They’ve broken the seal.”