Chapter 9
Ash
Awareness doesn’t announce itself. It seeps through the veil of dreaming one soft breath at a time until I blink away the haze of sleep.
Darkness fills my vision. Then the heavy moon, hanging low and full, streaming silver through familiar windows.
Windows I haven’t seen in a month.
The Academy. My old quarters. The bed that was never really mine but felt like it anyway.
I’m dreaming.
But I know this moment, I lived it. The night Kieran broke into my room to drag me out of bed and spar at three in the morning. The night I wanted to kill him almost as much as I wanted to kiss him.
I look down at my wrist. Bare. No silver-blue glow. No pulse of connection.
The bond doesn’t exist here.
I turn to the corner where he should be.
He’s there. Shadow and moonlight and ice-blue eyes that see right through me.
“You sleep like prey, troublesome thing.”
The words drift through the air and land in my chest where his absence has been aching for a month. But this isn’t memory anymore. The Kieran I remember didn’t look at me like this, like I’m water and he’s been crawling through a desert.
Unlike then, I don’t reach for the weapon under my pillow. I sit up slowly, the sheet pooling at my waist, wearing the same nightshirt I wore that night.
Inch by inch he leans forward, elbows on his knees, fingers pressed to his lips. That look of mischief I remember. But underneath it, hunger. Desperation. The look of a man who’s been counting days.
My breath huffs out and even in my dream my eyes water.
I want this to be real so badly it hurts.
“I know this moment,” I say, blinking away the burn. “We lived this memory together.”
“We did.”
“And yet you didn’t say that. Not then.”
“No.” Ever so slowly, he moves to the edge of the bed. Like I’m something wild that might bolt. Like he’s been waiting a month for this moment and can’t bear to ruin it. “I didn’t.”
Snowflakes drift from his fingertips. Soft. Delicate.
I almost laugh. The Unseelie prince who used to leave frost in his wake now snows like a lovesick fool.
“This conversation never happened,” I whisper.
“No. It didn’t.” He watches me with those winter-sky eyes. “What else didn’t happen, Ash?”
“You’re acting strange.” I lean back, then remember this is my dream. My rules. I reach forward and press my fingertips against his shoulder.
Solid. Real. Warm beneath the cold.
The moonlight catches his eyes as I lean closer. So blue. Like a winter sky days after a storm, when the snow is piled high and the sun is fighting to break through.
And they’re his. Not a memory. Not a wish. Him.
I remember the first time he looked at me with the same look he’s giving me right now. I had to look away then because he saw too much of me. Now? Now I want him to unravel me one layer of history at a time.
“How many times?” I ask.
He pauses. “What?”
“How many times did you try to reach me before tonight?”
His jaw tightens. “Twenty-three.”
Twenty-three nights of him walking through shadows, searching for me in dreams, finding nothing but empty dark.
“Kieran.” I choke on his name.
He doesn’t let me finish. His lips crush mine and it isn’t a pretty kiss. It’s full of longing and desperation, the need to feel another person after too long apart. Teeth clash and scrape. Tongues taste and war.
I can’t get enough of him. I can’t get close enough.
My hands drag him to me by that ridiculous court garb. My fingertips find his flesh, his skin, the scars I know are there, the definition of muscle, the warmth of the Spear beneath his ribs.
This is my Kieran. My Kieran.
I grip his chin and pull him back. “How?” I look at his lips wet from my kisses, then back to his eyes.
“Dreaming.” He pushes me into the bed, hovering over me on his knees as he rips off his coat and shirt.
I hear nothing but the roaring in my ears as I look at him. The defined muscles that look sculpted from ice. The trail of hair leading down, down.
I lick my lips and drag my gaze back up.
“Keep looking at me like that, troublesome thing, and this will not last long.”
I hide a laugh because Kieran is many things, but a minute man isn’t one of them. “How is this possible?”
He leans over me, capturing my lips in a slow kiss that curls my toes and sends my back arching against his body. His lips make me forget everything. How he’s here. Kissing me. Touching me.
“Wait,” I gasp, pulling back. “My magic.” I look at my hands, then his body. “What if I hurt you?”
“Not in the dreaming.” He runs his thumb across my forehead. “It’s a form of shadow walking. Dream walking. The magic is the dream itself.”
“So it’s really you.”
“Yeah.” His mask slips, just for a breath, and I see the fear beneath it. The twenty-three nights of reaching and finding nothing. “It’s really me.”
I shove him onto his back and straddle him, pinning his wrists above his head exactly like that morning he woke me to spar. My magic held him then.
I hold him now.
“Then where the fuck have you been?”
His eyes darken. “Exiled. Blocked. Trying to reach you every—”
“Wrong answer.” Hovering over him, I reach down with one hand, freeing his cock by tugging on the tie.
“Ash,” he warns.
Clearly I ignore him as I sink down onto him in one slow, devastating slide.
His head falls back. A groan tears from his throat, raw, wrecked, mine.
“I wasn’t wearing panties,” I remind him, rolling my hips with excruciating patience. “Remember?”
“I remember everything.” His voice is gravel. “Every sound you made. Every time you said my name. I’ve been replaying it for a month while trying not to snow on everything I touch.”
I still.
“You’ve been snowing?”
“Don’t.” His jaw clenches. “Orion already mocked me for it.”
A laugh bubbles up, genuine, surprised, the first real one in weeks. “The fearsome Unseelie prince. Leaving snowflakes everywhere because he misses me.”
“I will flip you over and make you pay for that.”
“Promises, promises.”
He breaks my hold on his wrists and sits up, ripping the dream-shirt from my body and closing his lips around my nipple. It’s like running an ice cube across heated skin, amazing and stinging in all the right places.
“Oh.” I jerk my hips as he bites down.
“Two can play this game, Ash.” He grips the back of my neck, pulling me closer. “You think I wouldn’t come for you?”
I hesitate.
It’s barely a breath. But in that breath I’m eight years old, waiting by a window for a father who never came. I’m eighteen, watching my unit leave me behind because the mission mattered more. I’m twenty-six, deleting voicemails from cousins because I stopped trying.
I’m every version of myself who learned that waiting is just disappointment with a longer timeline.
He sees it. Of course he sees it, he sees everything.
The hurt that flashes across his face nearly breaks me.
He goes still. Completely still, even though he’s inside me, even though we’re both shaking with want.
“Ash.”
“It’s not about you.” The words come out cracked. Broken in places I didn’t know were still bleeding. “I spent a long time only having myself to show up for me. When you learn that lesson young enough, it sticks.”
His hand finds my jaw. Tilts my face until I have to look at him.
“Then let me teach you a different lesson.”
“Kieran—”
“I would burn every court to ash to reach you.” His voice drops, and the dream itself seems to hold its breath, the moonlight sharpening, the shadows going still, as if even this place knows a vow when it hears one.
“I would walk through every nightmare my father could construct. I would dream-walk until my mind shattered trying to find you.” His thumb traces my cheekbone.
“You deserve to be found, troublesome thing. You deserve to feel wanted. And if it takes me the rest of my existence to make you believe that—” Snowflakes drift between us, landing on my cheeks, melting against my skin. “Then I have time.”
Something inside me cracks. An emotion so deeply buried that I had no idea how it felt until this very moment.
He sees it happen. Sees the walls come down.
And then, only then, does he start to move again.
“And the others?” I gasp between thrusts, because I need to know. Because I’ve been pretending I don’t care for a month and I can’t anymore. “Orion? Finnian?”
Pain tightens his jaw. But he doesn’t stop moving. “Orion’s been burning through the borderlands trying to find a way in. Nearly got himself killed twice.” He rolls his hips and I see stars. “The Cauldron was ripped from his chest tonight.”
“What?”
“Long story. He’s alive. Furious, but alive.”
“And Finnian?”
The pause is longer this time. His rhythm falters. “Finnian blames me for not warning them about my father’s plan sooner.”
“Is he wrong?”
“No.” The word is quiet. Honest. “He’s not wrong.”
I file that away with all the other things I can’t afford to feel right now.
“They’re waiting,” Kieran says, picking up his pace again. “All of them. For a way to reach you.”
No bond to confirm it. No magic pulsing between us. Just his word. Just trust.
I kiss him instead of crying.
“Now let me fuck you until you’re screaming my name.” He leans back, gripping my ass in one hand while the other holds us both steady. He rolls his hips up, his cock dragging against my g-spot until I see stars.
“Yes,” I manage. “You should definitely do that.”
My head falls back as he drives into me and I no longer care that this is a dream because it feels real.
“Is this how you dream of me?” he asks, not stopping as he fucks me.
Words. He wants words. When I can barely remember my own name. “Don’t stop.”
He pulls out and flips me onto my stomach.
“Ass up.” The words come out wrecked. “Spread your knees.”
It’s the act of him giving instructions that nearly sends me over the edge. He grabs my hips, yanking me back against him, my knees spread wide enough that I feel the stretch in my hips.
And when he slides forward, I swear I feel him in my chest.
A long, low groan falls from my lips as he grinds deeper than any man has ever been. His hand presses against my lower back as he begins to fuck me, relentless, but slow. So goddamn slow.
Every breath, in and out, I feel him. Until this trance-like state washes over me and all I am is sensation. All I breathe is him.
His hand turns my chin and he’s kissing me again, stealing the last of my awareness until an orgasm ripples through me. Through it all he never stops, not even when his long, drawn-out groan signals his release.
“I don’t want to close my eyes,” I say, breathless. “What if I close them and wake up?”
“You will.” He doesn’t lie. Can’t lie. But more than that, he wouldn’t lie to me. I feel that certainty even without the bond to confirm it. “And then it’s back to reality.”
I drop my head to the pillow with a hiss. Kieran wraps his arms around me, drawing me close against his chest.
“Are you safe?” he asks. The words come out strained.
“Your father doesn’t bother me.” I yawn and roll over, kissing his lips. “It’s Amarantha I worry about.”
He freezes. Every muscle locking like I’ve just told him the room is on fire.
“Amarantha is there?”
“Yeah.” I trace the line of his collarbone, not understanding the shift. “Apparently they’re working together. Your father and her. Something about the next trial.”
“Ash.” He grips my shoulders. The playfulness is gone. The heat is gone. There’s only ice now, the old Kieran, the one who calculated threats before he let himself feel anything. “You need to wake up.”
“What? Why?”
“My father is cruel, but he’s predictable. He wants to own you. Control you. Use you as leverage.” His fingers dig into my skin. “Amarantha doesn’t want to own you. She wants to break you. There’s a difference.”
“I can handle—”
“She broke Finnian.” The words come out jagged. “Spent years manipulating him after she had his parents executed. And he’s the strongest person I know.”
The warmth drains from the dream. I can feel it, the edges going thin, reality pulling at me.
“The Trial of Survival isn’t just a test. It’s an execution dressed in ancient law. And if Amarantha is involved in the design—”
“Then it’s personal.”
“Then it’s a trap specifically built to destroy you from the inside out.” He shakes me. Not gently. “Wake up. Now. And whatever mercy they offer, whatever deal they pretend to extend, don’t trust it.”
“And if I can’t run?”
“Then fight.” He presses his forehead to mine. The dream is fraying at the edges, pulling apart like wet paper. “Fight until we get to you. Because we are coming, Ash. I swear on every shadow I command, we are coming.”
“Kieran—”
The dream rips.
Not fades. Not dissolves. Rips, like something tearing me out of his arms by force.
One second his skin is against mine, his breath warm on my lips, his voice in my ear. The next I’m gasping awake in cold stone darkness, my hand still reaching for a chest that isn’t there, my lips still shaped around his name.
Alone.
The word has never felt so heavy.