Chapter 20 #2
“You’re safe. I promise,” he forces out. “Now eyes on me. Breathe. I’ve got you.” His voice is ragged, every sinew in his body straining as he braces himself against the wall. His arm knots with corded muscle as he pins his body against the stone and hauls me up.
“Here.” His voice is rough, urgent. “See the footholds between mine?” He jerks his chin down, sweat dripping from his temple. “When I move, put your feet there.”
He shifts, bracing with one arm and a single foothold, his body straining as he frees the other leg.
As soon as he moves, I scramble to dig my toes into the sand where he showed me.
Knees shaking, teeth rattling, I wedge myself between him and the wall, willing it to take most of my weight to give him even a moment of relief.
With a grunt, Declan regains his hold. We’re pressed so close I feel the heat radiating off him, burning through every layer of fabric between us. His breath comes in harsh bursts against my hair, and the solid pound of his heart rattles through my back.
“Good,” he breathes. “Press in. Hips to the wall. Use your legs. Where my hands are—grab the holds.”
My hands, slick with sweat and sand, tremble as I reach up and lock my fingers around the same ridge. His knuckles are white, fingers straining where they hold on next to mine.
“Now push,” he orders, shifting his weight just enough to give me a boost.
I shove off, muscles screaming, hooking my foot on a jagged tooth of sandy stone. Declan guides me higher, talking through each move, grab by grab, so close behind me that the heat of him rises with me. My trust in him, more than myself, is what keeps me climbing, what holds me together.
Finally, with one last desperate heave, the wall gives way to open air.
I spill over the edge in a tangle of limbs, rolling onto a hill of soft sand.
With a groan, I drag up the last scraps of strength in my body to twist and look down the dune.
The guards’ torches wink against the dark like a scatter of fireflies—fragile, distant, far smaller than their shouts had made them seem.
Their voices sounded so close. They must have veered off, driven in another direction before they ever reached the rim of the Tower.
Declan hauls himself up and over the edge and rolls onto his back beside me. “The guards?”
“Ten minutes,” I breathe. “At least.”
We take a second to lie there. The cool night air sears my lungs, each gasp cutting deep, but I’m alive. We’re alive. Thanks to him. Something hot and wild floods my chest, more than adrenaline, bigger than terror. It’s him. It’s always been him.
Declan props himself on one elbow, his chest rising and falling in rough, ragged pulls. His hair sticks to his forehead, a streak of blood smears down his forearm. He looks wrecked—and devastatingly handsome.
The dam inside me breaks. The fear, the trust, the passion—it all floods out. Tears blur the stars above us, and I laugh through them, shaky and wild.
“I love you.” The words tumble out, uncontrolled, unstoppable. “Holy shit, Declan Thorne, I fucking love you.”
Not just because he literally saved my life, but because he’s seen every awkward, shameful, messy part of me and stayed.
Because he wants us to grow into something better together.
I finally found him. The one person who won’t shatter my heart, who won’t turn away once he sees me completely.
The one I can trust more than I even trust myself.
For the first time, it feels like I did something right.
He closes his hand over mine and cups my face with the other, thumb swiping a tear off my cheek.
“I fucking love you too.”
We crash together in a kiss that’s all heat and teeth and panic.
His mouth is hot against mine, the taste of smoke curling over my tongue, the faint tang of ash clinging to his lips.
I fist my free hand in his shirt like I can hold us in this moment.
If I just squeeze tight enough, the guards, the queens, the whole magickal kingdom, won’t be able to touch us.
Our lips break, our breath mingling, smoke sweet and ragged.
“Let’s get out of here,” I whisper, the words falling over themselves in their rush to escape.
“We can figure out where to go after—once we’ve escaped.
How about the Kingdom of Cups? They think we’re from there anyway.
We’ll just…keep running until we figure out how to get home.
” I pull back enough to meet his eyes, my grip on him aching, my pulse pounding so hard it hurts.
“Whatever we decide, we’ll be together. And that’s what matters. That’s all that matters.”
For a heartbeat, he’s with me in that fragile, impossible hope. Then, the air shifts, and his hand slips from my cheek. He sits up, creating space that wasn’t there a breath ago, and brushes the sand from his hair.
“I want to be with you, Amanda, I do. But…” His throat works. “I need to be honest. About everything. Even if it risks this.”
I blink up at him, teary, blotchy, smiling like a buffoon. “You’re not about to tell me you secretly hate cats and cuddle Cinder to rub in how much she despises me, are you? Because that would really kill the vibe.”
A strained laugh breaks out of him, quick and fleeting. Then his expression sobers. He brushes his knuckles along his jaw.
My heart gives a single, hard kick, like it’s trying to break free of my chest. It knows before my brain fully has time to register that this is a deathbed confession. A final declaration before our story ends. And the way he’s looking at me… I already know it’s going to hurt.
“No. Nothing like that.” He swallows, gaze flicking away, then back to mine. “But I have been keeping something from you.”
“Okay…” The word comes out thinner than I mean it to.
An icy prickle rushes under my skin. I shiver and sit up. I’m suddenly too aware of how little I’m wearing in this desert realm, how bare I’ve become with him. As if on instinct, my arms fold over my middle, protecting myself.
“Fuck, I hope this isn’t a mistake.”
“What is it? What aren’t you telling me?” My voice is brittle. My nerve endings frayed, muscles braced for the blow.
“When we matched on Flutter…” He pauses, shaking his head. “It wasn’t supposed to be real. We weren’t supposed to end up like this.”
“You didn’t want to be magickally dropped into another world?” I try to laugh, a weak spark in the gloom.
“You were market research. I was considering funding a dating app company. Wanted to get an idea exactly how it worked. Us matching…” He pauses, dragging his hand down his cheek as each word sticks like a hot coal against my skin.
“I wanted to see firsthand how effective the algorithm was. I didn’t want to be with anyone, but I did need to know if it would pair me with someone I connected with beyond the physical.
Would my money be going toward a product that could create real relationships? ”
The breath leaves me in a pained exhale, sharp enough to feel like a blade slipping between my ribs.
My body still aches from the Tower, from the fall, from what I let happen between us.
What I asked for. What I surrendered to.
The places where he touched me still hum with the ghost of his hands, and for the first time, that memory feels like contamination.
I clamber to my feet, anger blistering to the surface.
Heat floods my limbs, my face as my mind claws back through every moment, dragging red ink across every touch, every yes, every truth I thought we’d whispered into being.
One by one, the ink bleeds through until the memories are illegible, until I can’t tell if any of it was real.
“I’m a case study.”
Declan scrambles up beside me. “Not anymore.”
“But I was.”
Every beat of my heart chars its edges, turns it to ash inside my chest.
“Amanda—”
He reaches for me, and I back away, pressing my hands to my chest, like I can hold my heartbreak together while everything else falls apart.
“Don’t touch me. You don’t get to touch me.
Not after—” My teeth sink into the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
“Not after telling me I was an assignment. A line item in your fucking market research.”
“I didn’t expect any of this,” he says, voice rough, like he’s trying to hand me a piece of himself.
But I don’t have the ability to hold anything from him.
Not when my own insides are scraped raw.
So I turn to deflection, barbed and ugly, the armor I wear when the truth cuts too close and thinking positively, using affirmations and crystals, won’t dull the pain.
“Should I be grateful you caught feelings instead of just meeting up to fuck me for the sake of your spreadsheet?” My laugh is flat and humorless. “Is that what your mommy and daddy wanted for you? Because it sure looks like you can make your own choices. You just hide the inconvenient ones.”
He looks at me like I’ve just torn the last piece of him out of his chest.
“I should have known better. Even though this is the worst possible setting, you were—” I falter, because if I try to name what this man means to me, it will consume me whole. “This was all too good to be true. I should’ve known it wouldn’t stick.”
“You’re wrong, Amanda,” he says, the edges of his words rough. “I am so sorry I hurt you. But what we had—what we have—is not too good to be true. It’s real. I love you. That’s real. That will never change.”
“You lied to me,” I cry. “About what you wanted. What you were even doing on the app. That you were using me. Everything between us is built on that lie. And of course you made the best of a shitty situation. You didn’t have much of a choice.
Kind of hard to gather data about how well the algorithm picked a partner for you and then ghost me when you got your answers when we’re trapped in the same nightmare. ”
“Amanda, I—” he starts again, another apology already forming.