Chapter 17 #2
"Your breath and mine," I whispered. "The spark. The transfer of heat from one core to another. I give you my fire to burn away the pain, and you give me an anchor. A reason to stay in this form."
Aria stared at me. The amethyst in her eyes seemed to swirl, the gold flecks catching the dying light of the fire. "Is this... is this necessary for the binding? For the door?"
"This is necessary for you," I said fiercely. "Unless you prefer to be in agony?"
She searched my face, looking for deception, for the manipulation of the seer. I let her look, let her see the raw, hungry emptiness behind my eyes. I let her see the man who had watched the world burn a thousand times and just wanted to save one small, fragile thing from the fire.
"Okay," she breathed.
Fire blazed in her eyes, a reflection of my own copper heat. It wasn't submission; it was a challenge. A dare.
I moved closer until my knees brushed hers. I reached out, cupping her face in my hands. Her skin was cool, clammy with shock, but beneath it, I felt the erratic, fluttery pulse of the golden veins.
"This will burn," I warned her, my thumbs tracing the line of her cheekbones. "But it will be a good burn."
"I'm not afraid of fire," she whispered. "I'm the one who lit the match, remember?"
I leaned in.
Our lips met, and the world dissolved into white.
It wasn't like Kaelen’s kiss that we had all watched from the other side of the Gate. That had been all dominance and consuming heat. This wasn't earth-shattering or violent. It was precise, a scalpel made of light.
My energy poured into her, not a flood, but a directed stream. I sought the micro-fractures in her bones, the torn fibers of her muscles, the raw, scraped endings of her nerves. I found the places where the cosmos had rubbed her raw, and I cauterized them with gentle, humming warmth.
She gasped against my mouth, her hands flying up to grip my wrists.
Heat.
I felt her relief as the pain evaporated, replaced by a buzzing, golden vitality. I felt her lungs expand fully for the first time in hours without hitching.
But then, the flow reversed.
I had intended to give, only to give. But Aria? She was something nature abhorred. A door that swung both ways.
As I poured healing into her, she pulled me into her.
I tasted rain. I tasted the smell of old stone and wildflowers pressed in secret places. I tasted a loneliness that matched my own, a hollow ache that had been carved out by years of silence.
But beneath the loneliness, I tasted the fog.
The static I had sensed earlier? The clouding of her future? As our connection deepened, shifting from medical to metaphysical, I touched the edge of it.
All I could tell was that it wasn't natural. It wasn't trauma. It was a wall.
Someone had placed a veil over her timeline. A powerful, deliberate obfuscation. It felt cold. It felt like... crossroads.
The idea made a name want to surface in my mind, unbidden, a ghost from a history lesson I dimly recalled. But the more I reached for it, the more I lost my grasp on it, like sand sifting through my fingers.
I tried to pull back, to analyze the anomaly, but Aria made a sound, a soft, desperate whimper in the back of her throat, and her fingers tightened on my wrists, sliding up to tangle in the hair at the nape of my neck.
She opened her mouth, deepening the kiss, and logic evaporated.
The analytical distance I prided myself on shattered. The observer became the participant.
I wasn't healing her anymore. I was drowning in her.
The kiss evolved, shifting from a transfer of energy to a collision of souls. I felt her hunger, sharp and surprising. It wasn't just physical; she was starving for contact, for proof of existence. And I was a man who had lived in the abstract for aeons. I had watched life from a distance.
Touching her, tasting her, feeling the frantic beat of her heart against my chest... it was the most real thing I had ever experienced.
My hands slid from her face to her waist, pulling her off the stone floor and into my lap. She went willingly, straddling me, her body pressing against mine with feverish urgency. The wool of our stolen clothes was a barrier I desperately wanted to burn away.
"Aria," I gasped, breaking the kiss to breathe, my forehead resting against hers. My vision was swimming; the future fracturing into a billion kaleidoscope shards of her. "You are... overwhelming."
"Don't stop," she whispered, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands clutching my shoulders. "Please. It makes the noise stop."
"What noise?"
"The fear," she said. "The doubt. When you touch me, I just feel you."
My heart, that ancient, forged thing in my chest, skipped a beat.
I kissed her again, and this time, I didn't hold back the phoenix. I let the fire rise to the surface of my skin, warming us, wrapping us in a cocoon of thermal energy. I let her taste the ashes of the worlds I had seen die, and the sparks of the stars I wanted to place at her feet.
We were lost in the friction, in the heat, in the desperate, clawing need to be close. For a moment, I forgot the cavern, I forgot the Devourer, and I forgot the lie I had told Kaelen.
I didn't hear the footsteps returning from the tunnel.
"Well," Flynn’s voice cut through the haze, dry and laced with a dangerous amusement. "I guess she wasn't that hungry."
Aria jolted in my arms, her eyes snapping open.
I looked up, breathless, my lips swollen and tingling.
Flynn stood at the edge of the firelight, a string of pale, eyeless fish in one hand. Beside him, Kaelen stood frozen, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword so hard the leather groaned.
The Dragon Prince’s eyes were burning gold, and the look on his face wasn't amusement. It was devastation.
"Is the healing finished?" Kaelen asked, his voice dead flat.
I looked at Aria, flushed and trembling in my lap, her lips red from my own. I felt the connection between us, a new, vibrant golden thread humming in the air.
"No," I said, meeting my brother's gaze. "I think it has only just begun."
But as I looked at Kaelen, I saw a question in his eyes that terrified me more than any prophecy.
If she chooses you, his gaze seemed to ask, what is left for me?