Chapter 25 #2
She inhales sharply, but not in surrender. Her gaze flickers, her throat bobbing once as she looks away. The silence stretches and with it, dread coils in my gut.
“That… displeases you?” I ask, quieter now, bracing for the blow.
She doesn't answer.
Not with words.
She slips from my arms, and it feels like loss, like the cold rush of sea air where once there was warmth. But then her hand finds mine again, fingers twining gently.
“Can we walk?” She asks softly, like it’s not a question about movement at all, but something else. Something harder to name.
At that moment, Reon and Zyphoro collapse in a heap on the deck, howling with laughter, legs tangled. Solena cheers them on from Orios’s arms, his expression smug and smitten.
But all of it fades when Amara looks up at me.
I nod. “Of course.”
She leads me away from the lantern light and laughter, up the narrow stairs toward the prow of the ship. The sounds behind us dim, until there is only the rhythmic creak of wood, the hush of the ocean below, and the ever-present thrum of the thread between us, pulling taut with every step.
We reach the front of the ship, where the sea stretches out before us like eternity painted in ink and silver. Stars ripple in the water. A full moon crowns the waves. The wind brushes her hair across her cheek and I tuck it behind her ear, unable to stop myself.
She doesn’t pull away.
“I am human, Daed,” she says into the wind, her voice brittle and breaking against it. “We do not have mates. Not the way Fae do. So tell me, what does it mean? What must I do?”
I lift my hand to her face, gently cupping her cheek, desperate to tether her to me. “Nothing,” I whisper. “You do nothing but let me love you, Amara.”
But still, she resists.
She always resists.
“What is it?” I ask, my voice raw. “What has changed in you? Why do you flinch from my touch? Why will you not let me share your bed?” I pause, then let the question that has gnawed at me for days fall from my lips like poison. “Is it him? The Golden Son? Has he changed you?”
Her head jerks toward me, eyes fierce.
“Do you… feel something for him?” The words burn. My chest aches, hollow and tight.
Her response is quick, almost furious. “Do not mistake asking you to spare him for having any feelings for that man. He threatened the Grove. He murdered Arax.” Her voice catches like splinters in her throat.
“I will never forgive him for that. Even if he’s trying to make amends.
But if I can’t forgive Ronin, how in all the realms am I supposed to forgive you? ”
I stare, the words crashing into me like a wave.
“Forgive me?” I echo, stunned. “For what?”
She gives a mocking gasp. “For what you knew. For what you planned.” Her gaze cuts through me. “It wasn’t until we were apart that I saw it clearly. What you put me through was not worthy of love. You lied to me, Daed.”
I nod once, slowly, accepting the weight of what she lays before me.
“I know I have wronged you, but you cannot imagine the grip they had on me. The power. The scars they carved deep, beneath the skin, into my very soul. I didn’t know another way to survive.
” My voice wavers, pleading now. “But you… you freed me from that prison. You made me want to be different. You made me better. I was myself, Amara. Truly myself, for the first time, because of you.”
I move toward her, step by careful step, drawn like the tide to the moon. My hands find her waist, gods, how I ache to touch her, and I draw her gently toward me, until the shape of her presses into mine.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, the words a vow etched into the dark.
“I’ll be sorry every day I breathe. Sorry until my final breath, and I will show you every day that I am sorry.
Just… please, wife…” My voice breaks, trembling with the weight of it.
“Let me lie beside you. Let me hold you. Let me kiss you. Let me give you everything you need… and everything you deserve.”
I bend to her, lips hovering just above hers.
I can feel her breath, sweet and uneven.
Her chest rises with each inhale, desire clashing with defiance.
My hands slide along the curve of her hips, the softness of her drawing a tremble from me, my thumb brushing across her skin like a man desperate for absolution.
“Amara,” I whisper, her name a sacred thing. “My queen. My wife. My life. I love you.”
I lean in, aching to claim her lips, her mouth, her surrender.
But her hand rises. Firm, cold, and unrelenting, and presses hard against my chest.
I freeze.
I look down at that hand. So delicate. So slender. Yet it holds me like iron.
“No,” she says, the word immovable.
I blink, as if I must have imagined it. But then she says it again, lower this time.
“No… husband.”
The title should bring closeness. Instead, it carves a canyon between us.
I flinch, staring at her in a haze of disbelief. “What must I do, then?” I ask, barely breathing. “How do I earn your forgiveness?”
Slowly, she pushes against my chest. I stagger back like a man struck.
“I don’t know,” she says, and there’s sorrow in it. Sorrow and truth. “But you won’t earn it tonight.”
Even as she speaks, even as she denies me, my eyes are helplessly drawn to her neck. That warm, tawny flesh. The throb of her pulse. The rush of blood running just beneath the surface.
The urge to pull her to me, to make my mark, is almost as strong as the darkness inside me, always pressing closer, always waiting to take hold.
Just one bite.
That’s all it would take to claim her.
To make her mine beneath the stars and moon and night. For now. For always.
She can keep denying me. Keep fighting. Pretending what’s between us is anything less than an inevitable fate.
But if I bit her… if I marked her… I’d never lose her again. I’d find her anywhere and the world would know what she is.
Mine.
To protect.
To love.
Then her hand glides to that tender spot, and it’s as if she senses where my thoughts have strayed. I force my eyes away.
I’ve already done enough. Given her enough reasons to despise me.
To take her now, to sink my teeth into her flesh without permission… it would only drive her further from me. Would only harden the fury already simmering in her gaze.
Instead, I lift my eyes to the sky, to the crescent moon against the stretch of black velvet. My Amara follows, tilting her head toward the stars.
Her brow furrows. “That’s not the Lover’s Moon, is it?”
I laugh, low and quiet, my chin dropping to my chest. “No, my love. There’s no spell on us tonight. No Fae magic in the air. Just you and me.”
She exhales slowly, relief softening the edge of her voice.
“Good. The last thing I need is to be under the sway of more Fae trickery.”
She turns away then, toward the endless sea. The wind catches in her hair, and the moon spills across her skin like it worships her. And how could it not?
I don’t need to bite her.
Maybe I just need to tell her.
Tell her about the first time I saw her in the Grove. How I knew, even then, that she was mine. How I tried to stay away, to protect her from the life that would follow. From me.
Because if I claimed her, I knew how it would end. I’d seen it before. I watched it kill my mother.
But Amara, my wild, fierce bride… she wouldn’t care for words. Not now. Not after everything I’ve done.
So once again, I stay silent.
The great Prince of the Mordorin, brought low by the fear of his own wife’s wrath.
No teeth then. No words. But I must make her see.
I let the glamor rise, magic sliding across my skin like water. My features shift, melt, settle into the face of the man she stumbled upon in the forest. The human she mistook for a poacher. The one cloaked in a shimmer she couldn’t name.
When Daedalus fades, a shaky breath ripples through my chest.
I’m nervous.
My lips part. Her name trembles on the edge of my tongue, dry and clumsy. I hesitate.
She turns, slowly, her gaze moving toward me.
But just before her eyes can settle on my new face a cry splits the night.
At first, I don’t believe the words.
Then the wind stirs. The air snaps to life.
“Rook! Ithranor!”