Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
Rowan
The first time I saw her in this studio, she danced like she was dying. Like movement was the only thing anchoring her to her humanity. Now, she dances as if she owns the world. And maybe she does.
There’s a quiet defiance in the arch of her back, the sharp strike of her foot against the cracked floor. She doesn’t falter when she sees me in the doorway. Doesn’t slow. Doesn’t stop.
She’s not dancing for me. She’s not dancing for herself. She’s dancing because she can.
My breath catches as she spins on her toes, her arms sweeping into shapes I can’t name. Grace clings to her like a second skin, and I feel it again. The pull. The tether. The ache in my chest that shouldn’t be there, but is.
She ends her final turn with one knee grazing the floor, her chest heaving. A thin sheen of sweat traces the curve of her neck, glistening as it slips between the valley of her breasts. I swallow hard, too aware of what she smells like.
Blood. Kaius’ blood.
It sings in her veins now. I can feel it. Taste it. It’s not just on her skin, it’s inside her too, soaking her bones.
She doesn’t look at me, but she knows I’m there. Her magic coils in response to mine, invisible threads of temptation weaving between us. I’m not trying to seduce her, at least not actively—but I can feel my powers leaking from my skin, wrapping around her. Teasing. Enticing.
It’s instinctual. In some ways, it’s dangerous.
And she doesn’t pull away.
Her chin lifts slightly, still refusing to meet my eyes, but I see the rise in her pulse. The small twitch of her fingers. She feels it. The warmth. The pressure. The invisible touch of me inside her magic.
It should be enough to satisfy me. A quick, delicious snack of temptation.
But all I feel is the cavernous ache of something I don’t want to name.
Jealousy.
For the ways she’s made him soft where I couldn’t. For the ways he’s allowed her in his heart that he never gave to me.
The Kaius I knew centuries ago didn’t share.
He barely allowed himself to be touched in all those sensual ways after Yekaterina.
But this version of him…this man who lets Adelasia drink from him, who lets her dance and fracture his palace with her sorrow just to rebuild it and let her break it again—he’s something else entirely. And she is the reason.
I wonder, as I watch her straighten and brush the hair from her damp brow, if she knows what she’s done to us. To me. To him.
I loved him once. Still do, in that buried way old gods love ruined temples. I watched him rise, fall, rise again. I watched him turn from me. Choose rage over love. Choose hope over fate. And now she stands where I once did, only stronger.
I wonder if the gods have truly mated her to us both—not by mistake, but by design.
I wonder if she can feel that she belongs to both of us, in such subtle ways she doesn’t even realize what they mean.
If she is truly ours, truly mine, then perhaps, just perhaps…I do not have to be alone again.