Wren
Getting him inside nearly killed us both.
Eight feet of feathers and muscle and deadweight.
Elspeth grabbed his feet, I hooked my arms under his wings, and we dragged him across the balcony stones inch by agonizing inch.
His head lolled. His eyes stayed closed.
The only sign he was alive at all was the shallow rise and fall of his chest and the heat pouring off him in waves.
“The nest,” I gasped. “Down the hall. The room with the furs.”
Elspeth didn’t ask questions. She just pulled harder.
We left a trail of feathers behind us. Bronze and black, drifting loose from his wings with every scrape against the floor. I’d pick them up later. Keep them. Proof that this night had happened.
The nest room. We rolled him onto the furs and silks he’d spent days arranging, and his wings spread beneath him like a dark halo, and he didn’t stir. Didn’t open his eyes. Didn’t make a sound.
I pressed my hand to his chest. His heart beat against my palm, but wrong. Too slow. Long pauses between each thud, like it kept forgetting to continue.
“Is he dying?” Elspeth’s voice was very small.
“No.” I wouldn’t allow it. “He’s empty. He gave everything he had to get us out, and now there’s nothing left.”
“What do we do?”
I looked at my sister. Almost sixteen years old. The one person who believed I could fix anything.
I thought about what he’d said on the balcony. The word he’d managed before the darkness took him.
Bond.
“I need you to explore,” I said. “Find the kitchen. It’s down the main corridor, past the library, third door on the left.
There’s a kettle on the stove. Tea in the cupboard above it.
Make some for yourself. Find food. Get warm.
” I squeezed her hands. “And find yourself a bedroom. There are dozens. Pick one you like, one with a view of the mountains. Make it yours.”
“But I should stay. I should help you lift him, or...”
“Elspeth.” I took her face in my hands, the way I used to when she was small and frightened. “I know how to help him. But I need time. And privacy. Can you give me that?”
She searched my eyes. I watched understanding dawn, followed by a flush that crept up her neck.
“Oh,” she said. “You mean... oh.”
“Sleep in your new room tonight. I’ll find you in the morning.” I managed a smile. “Don’t come looking for me unless the building is on fire.”
She nodded. Squeezed my hand once. And then she was gone, closing the door softly behind her.
I listened to her footsteps fade down the corridor. Counted to twenty. Made sure she was truly gone.
Then I turned back to him.
He lay in the nest we’d slept in together. The books he’d organized for me lined the edges, spines facing inward so I could read the titles.
He’d remembered everything. Every preference. Every offhand comment. He’d built me a home out of paper and silk and his own desperate hope that I would stay.
And now he was dying because he’d broken through a wall for me.
“Okay,” I said out loud. The sound of my own voice steadied me. “Hearts. You said hearts.”
The bestiary entry flashed through my mind. The bond texts I’d skimmed in the library, not thinking they applied to me. A sharing of life force. Each becomes anchor to the other. I’d read the words like academic theory. Now they were the only thing standing between Tavrin and death.
I pressed my palm flat to his chest, feeling for the beat. There. Slow. Stuttering. Wrong.
Then I pressed my other hand to my own chest. My pulse raced, beating against my ribs like a trapped bird.
He needed life. He needed an anchor. He needed someone to pull him back from wherever he’d gone.
He needed the bond.
I’d read about Roc mating bonds in his library. A week ago, when I was still pretending I wasn’t falling in love with him. The texts were clinical. Dry. Magical resonance. Permanent soul-links. Biological imperatives of the species.
They said nothing about a woman who’d known a monster for less than two weeks looking at his unconscious body and thinking: Yes. Him. Whatever it costs. Whatever it means. Him.
I pulled off my boots first. Practical. Then my jacket, still dusty from my uncle’s house. The buttons of my shirt came next, one by one, fingers steadier than I expected.
The air was cool on my bare skin. I shivered, but not from cold. From the weight of what I was about to do. The permanence of it.
He’d told me I should be sure.
I climbed into the nest beside him, pressing myself against the furnace of his body.
Even dying, he ran hotter than any human.
The warmth soaked into my bare skin, into my bones, into the cold places I’d been carrying for my entire life.
He smelled like wind and high places and something wilder underneath, something that made the animal part of my brain want to curl closer.
“Tavrin.” I said his name like a summons. “I need you to hear me.”
Nothing. His chest rose and fell. His eyes stayed closed.
“You told me the bond was permanent. You told me I should be certain before we did this.” I found his hand, laced my fingers through his.
His fingers didn’t curl around mine. They just lay there, fever-warm, unresponsive.
“I’m certain. I’ve been certain for days. I just didn’t have the words for it.”
His breathing stayed shallow. The pause between heartbeats stretched longer.
“You organize books by how much I love them.” My voice cracked.
I let it. “You want to know why?” I pressed my forehead to burning skin.
“A life and no one looked at me without weighing what I could do for them. My uncle saw a ledger-keeper. Sorley saw a body to use. Even the people who were kind, they were kind because I was useful. Because I made their lives easier.”
His eyes flickered. Still unfocused. But listening.
“You built a nest around me while I slept, with the astronomy text angled toward the morning light because I mentioned once, once, that I liked the star charts.”
A sound from his throat. Not a word. Acknowledgment.
“That’s not instinct. That’s not biology. That’s you, Tavrin. You, choosing me, in every way you knew how. Seeing me. Not what I could do. Me.” I kissed his cracked lips, tasting fever and desperation. “Do you know how long I’ve waited for someone to see me?”
His hand twitched against mine. The faintest pressure of fingers trying to hold.
“So I’m choosing you back. Right now. Are you listening?”
Nothing.
I kissed him.
His lips were dry. Cracked from fever. He didn’t respond, didn’t move, didn’t breathe any differently. I kissed him anyway. Soft. Patient. Trying to pour everything I felt into the press of my mouth against his.
Please, I thought. Please come back. Please don’t leave me alone in this world I just escaped into.
A sound.
Low. From deep in his chest. Not quite a word. Not quite a moan. Something between.
His fingers twitched against mine.
“Tavrin?”
“Wren.” A breath. Barely audible. My name shaped by lips that could hardly move.
“I’m here.” I kissed his jaw. His neck. The place where his pulse fluttered weak and thready. “I’m here. I’m staying right here. I need you to come back to me.”
His eyes opened. Just a sliver. Gold, bright gold, but glazed. Unfocused. Looking at me without quite seeing.
“Can’t.” The word cost him everything. “Empty.”
“Then take from me.” I rose up, swung my leg over his hips, settled my weight against him.
Even through the fabric of my trousers, I could feel the size of him, the solid reality of his body beneath mine, the warmth radiating through the cloth.
“The bond. You said it connects us. So let it connect us. Take what you need.”
“Hurt. You.”
“You won’t.”
“Don’t know. What I am. Anymore.”
I took his face in my hands. Made him look at me, made his gaze, serious and fierce, focus on my face.
“You’re Tavrin. You’re the monster who brought me poetry and starlight. You’re the man who broke through a wall because you heard my uncle yelling at me.” I kissed him, harder, trying to taste him past the fever. “You’re mine. Whatever you’re becoming.”
Something shifted in his eyes. The glaze receding, just a little. Focus sharpening, just enough.
His hands found my hips.
Not gentle. Not hesitant. His fingers dug into my flesh with a grip that would leave bruises, and I wanted them. Wanted the marks. Wanted proof.
“Yours,” he agreed. And pulled me down against him.
The kiss was different this time. Desperate. Consuming. He kissed me like I was oxygen and he was drowning. I kissed him back the same way, tangling my fingers in his hair, feeling the fever-heat of his scalp, the places where feathers were growing in along his hairline.
His hands moved up my bare spine. Mapping me. Learning the curve of my waist, the ladder of my ribs, the wings of my shoulder blades. When he reached my breasts, he made a sound that vibrated through my whole body.
“Off,” he managed, tugging at my trousers. “Need. All of you.”
I sat up. His hands fell away, and for a moment I was exposed, bare from the waist up, straddling a monster in a nest of silk and fur.
He looked at me.
Not the way men had looked at me before. Not assessing my usefulness or calculating my value or wondering what I could do for them. He looked at me like I was the first sunrise after a long winter. Like I was something holy.
“Beautiful.” The word was a rasp. “So. Beautiful. Wren.”
My hands were shaking as I unlaced my trousers. I stood just long enough to push them down, to kick them away, and then I was bare and he was looking at all of me and I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
“Come here.” He reached for me, clumsy with weakness but determined. “Please. Come here.”
I went.
I straddled him again, skin to skin now except for the fabric of his pants between us. The temperature of him was staggering. Like pressing myself against a sun-warmed stone. Like being wrapped in fire that didn’t burn.
“Hearts,” I said. “You said we need to match hearts.”