Chapter 53
Chapter Fifty-Three
Roremar
Not being allowed to kiss her was the sweetest torture derived just for him. A vice he never knew he needed until it was denied.
But that was her boundary, and Roremar would never force Emmeline across a line she wasn’t comfortable with. It would ruin them both. Even as the thought crossed his mind, a soft laugh echoed it, hardening his resolve.
“You’ll stay?” he asked again to be sure. He could see the instinct to bolt in her eyes, the gentle clench of her fingers through his. She wanted to be here, but there was a part of her—the little girl who had everyone close to her ripped away—that told her she couldn’t.
“I will,” she repeated, and Fates be damned, Roremar’s spirit lit up. For one night, he could have her. Not all of her, but he’d take what she offered.
He led her across the room, each step heavy with intimacy that ran deeper than anything they’d just done in the bathing chamber.
When they stopped beside the bed, the top layers of blankets rumpled, Emmeline’s eyes tracked over him. His sculpted shoulders, the line of his jaw. Every inch, as if she was truly letting herself look after denying that desire for so long.
It budded in the air, a crackle of a newly lit flame, a star threatening to fall from the sky.
She wanted him as desperately as he wanted her. But they couldn’t.
Still, that didn’t stop her from reaching out and lifting the hem of his tunic.
From tugging it over his head so he stood before her in nothing but his unbuttoned pants, hastily pulled over his ass after he’d made a mess in his damn hand.
And she stood with only a thin silk robe pulled around her, so undone as she looked him over.
“What are you doing, Huntress?” His voice was gravelly as she pressed a hand to his chest.
“Studying.”
He laughed. “Of course.”
He’d be her eternal subject if the Fates deemed him so lucky.
They won’t, he reminded himself. The Fates were never kind to him.
Gently, she dragged her nails over his tattoos. The letters down his ribs, the sigils on his forearm, the numerals and wings. Every one of them. She took her time, studying the delicate lines and intricate imagery.
And every time her fingers stroked his skin, he tried not to shiver. Forced himself not to lean into her touch. Though her hands on his body were fucking temptation, an act that would drive him to ruin, he’d gladly take that end to relish in her touch in a way he feared he never would again.
He wished he could see into her mind, could gather those pieces no one got and finish building his understanding of her.
He was so close, he was sure of it. After the Snake Charmer and everything she’d confessed—her mother and sister and past—and after the walls they’d obliterated tonight, the image of the woman before him was nearly complete.
There was just a little more she was holding back.
He wanted to taste those truths off her lips so desperately, the thought threatened to strangle him.
Fingers drifting over the letters stretching down the side of his ribs, she asked, “Will you tell me about them?” She blinked those wide hazel eyes up at him, every range of color visible in hesitant streaks.
With the moonlight from the window spilling over her, she was an ethereal kind of beautiful. Something unreal and untouchable.
Roremar lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to the tips of her fingers. If he couldn’t touch her how he ached to, at least he could do that.
Against her skin, he whispered, “Of course.”
Taking her hand, Roremar pulled her down to the bed. He leaned his back against the wall beside the window, pulling Emmeline into his lap so she was as close as possible. Moonlight spilled across the comforter, music and shouts drifting up from the street below.
Roremar started simple, holding his arm out before her. “The sigils are for my siblings.”
Her eyes lit up as they drank in each, the five designs spread across his arms, some entwined. “Aevollon and Serchus,” she recited, tracing them. “Hyllara and Anhala.” Her eyes flashed to his. “That’s Siena, isn’t it?”
“Of course.” He laughed.
“She’s fiery. You’re in trouble with her.”
“I fear it every day.” His chest tightened at the pure wonder in her voice over his siblings. Was she thinking of her own sister? Worried where she was in the world?
“If all of their Fate ties have emerged, why aren’t they at the Academy?”
Roremar sighed, fist clenching. “They are now, but they’re all in Myrella’s class as first years.”
“All their ties showed up at once?”
“No, they’ve shown up over the past few years. Vivienne was last—just a few months ago.” He gestured to Hyllara’s sigil, the blooming tree the darkest, most recent ink. “But they’d been at a small school across the isle until I started working on this case.” He swallowed the knot in his throat.
“You didn’t want them at the Academy because of your uncle,” Emmeline guessed.
Roremar nodded. “And we couldn’t afford it.”
Emmeline’s fingers drifted to the final sigil. The veiled statue with roses sprouting in her wake. “Anphrosia?” she barely whispered, fear darkening her tone.
“My sister on the continent. She’s okay. She won’t be returning to Lyra anytime soon.”
“Good.” Emmeline’s eyes paused on the winged mask of Serchus. “When I read earlier tonight, Metrina told me something that I think pointed to Serchus. Something about protect the greed of illusions and heralds of secret currency.”
“What in the Angel’s fuck could that mean?” Roremar asked, trying to put together the vague hints. “Is she saying this is all connected to Serchus instead of Anphrosia?”
“I don’t know.” Emmeline shook her head. “They both have a history with cult worship. Perhaps we were right about that.”
“Maybe…” Roremar dragged out the word, studying the winged mask. That line of thought didn’t feel complete. “When is the Fate of Prophecy and Demise ever helpful?”
“True,” Emmeline agreed with a small smile, covering the sigil.
“We’ll know for sure soon, hopefully,” Roremar said.
Emmeline’s fingers curled around his arm as if begging him to continue with the tattoos, dragging to the letters scrawled on his ribs.
“Those are for my father. The date he died.” Letters instead of numbers, an ancient way of marking dates that many on the Constellation Isles still honored.
To Roremar, it held more weight when immortalized that way.
His throat was thick, but he pushed through it, pointing to the eight stars mapped below and the lines connecting them.
“The constellation beneath it was how he always pictured our family. And the words on the other side are the name of his favorite boat he ever owned. REIGNARA ASTELLA.”
The bold, capital letters spelled the memory down his left obliques. His father said the name was a language lost to the warriors. Never forget those who came before us, he’d told Roremar on more than one occasion.
That tattoo was his favorite. Every time he looked at it, he thought of each day out on the water with his dad.
Especially the ones they were alone. When he learned his greatest life lessons, shared his deepest fears.
When they spent the evening before that last assignment watching the sunset on the ocean, and an odd sense of finality had settled in the air as his father reminded him to always remember the people and places that made him feel alive.
He held in a breath as Emmeline traced the letters slowly, like every touch was imprinting them in her memory. That message was certainly one he’d let himself forget over recent years, without realizing it. He brushed aside the remorse now, focusing on her.
Emmeline looked up at him, her eyes dropping to his mouth. Her tongue wet her bottom lip. Fuck, he didn’t have the control for this.
“No kissing, Huntress. Right?” The words were rough, his hand fisting against her.
“Right,” Emmeline breathed, and she tore her eyes away.
She continued her exploration, fingers traveling to the piece that wrapped his left shoulder.
“What’s this?” she asked softly.
“The wing…” He couldn’t help his rumble of nostalgic laughter.
“Honestly, Des was just bored with that one. He did it ages ago—we were barely eighteen. He wanted practice for something more artistic. I’d had a few drinks and told him to draw whatever he wanted.
” He looked at the fiery, feathered wings that overlapped, unsure where one ended and another began.
They stretched toward the sigils of his siblings.
“It’s abstract, according to him. Somewhere between an Angel and a phoenix.
” He shrugged. “I like it. And the memory associated with it.”
Something flashed through Emmeline’s eyes. Her teeth sank into her lip.
“You’re lucky to have a friend like him. All the memories.”
Her loneliness aside, the concession bled through him. Another reminder that she would be going to Valyn soon, would be only memories. A knot formed in his throat, but he swallowed past it and wrapped his arm tighter around her.
“I am, but he’s a stubborn ass at times.” He didn’t add that he wasn’t sure how his friend would feel if he saw them now, but Roremar was done pretending this thing between him and Emmeline wasn’t bigger than them.
“Keep going,” he urged, turning so she could study the tattoo on his back.
The largest one—in some ways the most personal. Her eyes draping over it were intimate, setting his flesh aflame.
“A panther,” she whispered. “Is it Cirre?”
He nodded, picturing the outline of a striking black panther tangled with a snake that Desmond had spent hours on.
“The day I found her when I was fourteen, she was wrestling a serpent. I thought she was in distress, so I jumped in.”
“Reckless,” Emmeline admonished, and he laughed.
“Apparently, she was okay—as she made sure to show me with a slash to my side.” The scar was dull now, just a silver speck in the moonlight beneath the ink.
“I got the piece done about seven years ago now.” Spinning back to Emmeline, he cradled her to him.
“After my father. She stayed close those first years, and I know the kids felt safer having her nearby. I was getting pieces of everyone else. It felt right to get her, too.”
Her brows creased as her gaze trailed over the array of ink scattered across his body. “None of your tattoos are for you,” she commented.
“What do you mean? They’re all the most important parts of me.”
She nodded. “But they all represent other people. None of them are about who you are.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said, tracing the ink himself. “But this is who I am. None of us exist in isolation. We’re forged by the people in our lives, by the love they show us and memories formed with them, the lessons learned.”
The corners of Emmeline’s lips tugged down, and Roremar immediately realized his mistake. While his life drowned him in never-ending responsibilities, it was also full. Full of love and family and laughter. And she was…
I’m not free. I’m alone, her voice echoed in his memory.
Roremar tipped Emmeline’s chin up to his. “You have them, too, Emmeline. Those memories can’t be taken from you. And I have a feeling more people love you than you think.”
“I don’t know if love is what I need,” she said. Each word sounded like it was being pulled from her.
“What is, then?”
She swallowed, the silence stretching so long, Roremar thought she might not answer. Then, finally, she whispered, “To belong somewhere.”
Pressing his lips to her forehead—the closest he’d let himself get to breaking her rules—he answered, “You belong here.”
And it didn’t feel like an exaggeration. Some part of him, deep within his soul, written in his spirit and woven through his blood, knew she belonged with him.
They spoke of everything and nothing at all for the next few hours, folded beside the window where the constellations watched them.
“Rore?” Emmeline whispered later as her head rested on his chest, her eyes closed. Fates, that familiar version of his name rolling lazily off her lips sewed up one of the endless wounds in his chest.
“Yes?” he asked, running his fingers down her spine. She melted further into him, moonlight bathing her features in a glassy ease he rarely saw of her. As if in his arms she finally felt like she could drop her guard. Like she was safe.
“One day,” Emmeline muttered, “when I meet them, I’ll tell the stars about you.”
His throat nearly closed at her soft words and the yearning that stitched through his heart. Each of her breaths fanning across his skin seemed to meld them further together, as if the Fates had written them purely for one another.
Perhaps they had, he thought. He may be wary of becoming her ruin, but couldn’t only someone so intrinsically meant for you hold the power to destroy you? Didn’t that mean that he was hers, and she his in return?
He wasn’t sure how it happened. He didn’t deserve Emmeline DeLeoste.
Not with all the magic she poured into the world, with her endless determination and strength and kindness.
No, he didn’t deserve to walk the same realm as her, but he’d be stupid to reject that kind of gift from the Fates when she was placed in his arms.
By the time he gathered himself enough to respond, he thought she was asleep. With a soft kiss to her hair, he whispered, “My Em…I’ll write our story in the galaxies.”