Chapter Thirty-Three Kian
I drop to my knees before Sarai. It’s ridiculously dramatic, and just the kind of thing she soaks up. And I need her to agree to what I am about to ask. “Let us say goodbye. Please.”
Sarai looks over at Adela, who grits her teeth but echoes my last word. “Please.”
She shrugs. “If you want to miss the feast, then that is up to you.”
“The feast?” I ask.
“Of course. It’s the first step of the matching ceremonies in the valley.” She claps her hands like an excited child. Her delight at her twisted play for power is sickening. Especially when she threatens Adela. “But don’t delay, little bird, or your father and friend will suffer.”
Sarai and her followers exit the crypt, half dragging Adela’s dad and Cecelia along. They’re trying to get to her. You don’t need to see their faces to know that they don’t want her to do this, to even consider it.
I do.
The moment I’m sure they’re gone, I use my magic to put back the door that Adela removed so adeptly to ensure our privacy. Then I gently remove her mask, dropping it to the earthen floor, so I can see her beautiful face in these last moments.
A crypt of creature bones isn’t the most romantic of places to tell someone the deepest secrets of your heart, but whether it’s by her hand or someone else’s, I won’t leave here alive. A few minutes alone with her to say goodbye will have to be enough.
She steps forward into my arms and kisses me gently on the lips. “It looks like you have a lot on your mind.”
“Well, I am about to die,” I say with a smirk.
She smiles back at me, a small, tired, hurting sort of smile. “I think it’s more than that.” She traces a finger along my hairline, across my ear, and down my neck. I love the way she touches me.
“I have one more betrayal to confess.” She waits while I fumble with where to start. She might be the destruction half of the phoenix, but I am the one who has ruined everything. I take a deep breath and begin. “I’m the one who destroyed the matching hut—”
“I know,” she interrupts.
“I truly believed it was the best way to do permanent damage to the orders…” I process what she’s said. “What do you mean, you know?”
“Cecelia told me back in the valley.”
“Cecelia knew?” The woman’s brilliant, but how could she have possibly figured out that I was responsible?
“Sort of. She’d been researching to confirm what everyone always says—that only dragon fire can burn the skulls.
We all assumed it was just a simplification.
After all, it’s not like another creature creates fire regularly.
” She pauses, looking up and to the side, thinking. “I wonder if they tested phoenix fire?”
“And?” None of that explains how she knew it was me.
“And Ulric wouldn’t have destroyed them. Then I remembered how interested you were in the pyres after the funerals. And how quickly you got to me in the forest, after you felt my distress. Almost as if you’d already been halfway there.”
She presses closer to me, taking both of my hands in hers. We’re nose to nose. She gives me a gentle kiss.
“When I found out that you’ve been working to take down the order for years, it all clicked.
Of course you were the one to burn down the hut.
” Her eyes lose focus again; then she shakes her head.
“That’s why you were so interested in lore about jackalopes.
You couldn’t get past their warrens. I take it that’s what your aunt meant about Ivo’s stories about the jackalopes being why Jamie wouldn’t enter the valley?
One of the territorial little suckers got him? ”
“In the leg. I honestly thought he was going to bleed out,” I reply, dumbfounded. She knew. All my secrets. I’m half-surprised she didn’t just immediately agree to Sarai’s demand to kill me. Or just offer me up as a sacrifice to save her valley, unprompted. “You don’t seem very upset.”
In fact, she is glowing. A glittering of starlight amidst the darkness of the crypt.
“Oh, I’m beyond livid,” she says. “But what am I going to do? Scold you for doing a thing the order would have done themselves if they had thought of it? Make you promise to never do it again?”
“Yeah… there’s not a lot of use squeezing promises out of a dying man.”
“And there’s not another hut to burn.”
I reach up and take her cheek in my hand. She does not flinch from me. I close my eyes and just rub my thumb against the softness of her skin, savoring the feel of her.
“The valley has started to come back to life because you destroyed the skulls and their magic infused the valley with magic. You did what needed to be done, for a variety of reasons.” She kisses me again, softly.
Her anger would have been easier to accept. I’d braced for hatred. Not… kindness. This forgiveness is nearly impossible to hold. Especially the hope that comes along with it.
That maybe she’s being so kind because her feelings are as deep as my own.
“Hey, you,” she says in the sweetest of voices. “Look at me.”
I do. Of course I do. I’m not going to argue with her about doing the exact thing I long to do for the rest of my—admittedly short—life.
“I’m sorry.” She wraps arms around my chest and buries her face into the nape of my neck.
“I’m sorry, for what’s about to happen. And I’m sorry that I revealed my face to the phoenix and set all of this in motion.
Everything I touch—everything I love—gets destroyed.
Even before the phoenix. I wish—” She pauses, her breathing hitches.
“What do you wish?” I ask softly. I trace a finger across her arm.
“I wish our roles were reversed.” The admittance breaks a piece of me in two. All this time, I had wished our roles were reversed. That I was the one wearing the destruction phoenix. That I had her power. And now to hear her wish the same…
“No,” I say.
Her breath is warm on my collarbone. I hear the very small hitch in her voice. “No?”
“No,” I repeat. “This is how it’s meant to be. This is who you are.”
“You think I’m a destroyer?”
I pull back from her, stepping away. I want to see her beautiful face. The soft slope of her cheekbones, the bright blue of her eyes. We’re still touching. I love the way our bodies fit so perfectly together, but now I can see her.
“I do not think you are a destroyer.” I try to find the words, the nuance so she can see inside my heart.
“I think you are like my parents were. They wanted to make the world better by whatever means they could. And they didn’t flinch from the efforts of that work.
They embraced it. Despite the costs to themselves. ”
“And it took them from you.”
I nod. She’s right. And I will be angry with them for that even into the after. “But they still did the right thing. They tried. Like you do.”
I kiss her, gently at first. She kisses me back. And then her intensity grows, quickly. In an instant, there’s a desperate fierceness to her kisses. I understand that desperation, that hurry.
Sarai only promised us the length of a feast, when an eternity wouldn’t be enough.
Adela’s starting to kiss frantically down my neck. She pulls at my tunic and unties the waistband of my trousers when I stop her. Before we get too caught up in our bodies, I have one more thing to share with her. One more thing she must know.
Something deep inside of me cracks open, and I am surprised at the joy and relief I feel at finally letting it go. “I love you.”
“You love me?” she asks. It’s a question, but there’s no uncertainty in it. Her voice is full of awe, not doubt.
“I do. Very much.”
“I love you, too,” she says. I did not know how much I had hoped to hear her say that. She traces a finger down my chest. “Now show me how much.”
I am exhausted down to my bones, but if these are the final moments I have with this beautiful, impossible, amazing woman, I am going to spend every single one of them showing her just how much she means to me.
I start slow, but Adela has no patience for my gentleness. Her kisses are hard, her lips and tongue and teeth insistent. I give her what she demands. I meet her frenzied pace, gripping her butt and pulling her into me, loving the way her ass cheeks overflow in my hands.
I lick and nip at her earlobe, and she twists her head to give me better access.
I see her practically melt with wanting, but she remains upright. She pushes at my shoulder, and I sink to my knees in front of her. She lifts her borrowed tunic up over her head and shimmies out of her pants until she is naked in front of me. I devour her with my eyes.
“Goddess, you are perfection. Let me worship at your altar.”
She lifts up one leg and rests her knee over my shoulder, balancing on one foot with her hands on my other shoulder and head. I help brace her with my hands on her hips, and she tilts forward until the wet, hot center of her is just in front of my face.
I kiss and bite her thighs, making her moan. I love the way my teeth make small marks on her paleness. Marks to remember me by once I’m gone.
I inhale deeply, loving the smell of her. I bury my face up and into her. Making sure she is steady, I move one hand until I have two fingers hovering just at her entrance. I begin to touch her slowly, circling around. I want her to be ready. I don’t want to hurt her, pushing too quickly.
But Adela is impatient. She bends her knee and sinks down onto my fingers, pushing them into herself fast and hard. She moans and grips my hair, tugging me closer, and moves her hips so I am touching her exactly where she wants, at the speed she wants.
I chuckle into her body as she writhes against my fingers and mouth, and match her urgency.
“I’m close,” she moans. “So close.”
I lift my face for a quick moment. “Come for me, Goddess.” I return to my work, praising her body, her soul, with my tongue, lips, and fingers.
She comes, swiftly and hard. I feel her starting to ebb and scoot away from me, but I hold her leg in place over my shoulder, not letting her go. I increase my speed and intensity. She comes again, and then again.
She is panting and sweaty when she finally tugs me away from her by my hair, laughing. “Stop,” she breathes. “Stop.”
She drops her leg, which is shaking, and pulls me up to my feet. Eyes half-closed with satiation, she kisses me deeply. Then she kneels in front of me.
“My turn to please you, love.”
I practically growl at the use of the pet name. Love. She loves me.
“What would you like?” she asks.
This brilliant, strong, powerful, perfect woman loves me. She wants to please me. But asking me what I want from her is impossible.
“I want all of you,” I say.
She pulls me to the hard-packed earth of the crypt, tugging my waistband down.
She straddles me, holding me in place while she sinks onto me without even a pause.
She’s wet, tight, fire, and I moan at how perfectly we fit.
Then she slides back up, hovering ever so slightly so that I am just barely inside her.
I groan, wanting her to take her pleasure.
She wiggles her hips a bit, teasing. “You want me? All of me?”
“I do.”
“Then take me,” she demands. “All of me is yours.”
I grip her hips, plant my feet for leverage and thrust up into her. She cries out, ecstatic. I continue to do exactly as she commands.