Chapter 25 #2
I take both her hands. Hold them between us. Run my thumbs across her knuckles while I look at her in the shifting aurora light, the dress throwing fragments of color across the moss, across my suit, across the charged air between us.
“I told you in the war room that I was going to marry you,” I say. “And I meant it. But I said it wrong.”
“You said it like an order.”
“I said it like a man who was afraid the chance would be taken from him if he didn’t say it fast enough.” I tighten my grip around hers.
I lift her hands to my mouth and press my lips to her knuckles, slow, one at a time.
“Elle. You came to Wynmire by accident and changed every reality that exists. You challenged me when everyone else bowed. You made me laugh when I’d forgotten how.
You scattered yourself across time to save a world that hadn’t earned you, and when I pulled you from the void piece by piece, you came back whole.
Sharp. Brave. So full of light you look like the rising sun. ”
Her eyes shine, wet and unblinking.
“I have loved you since you defied me in that tent in front of my entire crew and didn’t flinch when I tried to scare you.
I loved you through corruption, distance, and timelines that tried to erase us.
I will love you after this battle, after whatever comes next, and after every version of this story runs out of pages. ”
I lower myself to one knee.
The aurora flares overhead, violet, green, and blue, filling the chamber with light.
“Marry me,” I say. “Not because I decided it. Not because the universe arranged it. Because you want to. Because I am asking, on my knees. Marry me because I am yours and you are mine and I want the rest of our lives to start the moment you say yes.”
She drops to her knees in front of me. Takes my face in her hands and kisses me.
“Yes,” she says against my mouth. “Obviously, yes. A thousand times, across every timeline, yes.”
I make a sound against her lips that is half laugh, half something deeper, and I pull her against me so hard the breath leaves her body. The flowers on the walls pulse brighter, and the moss beneath us glows gold.
“I want you,” I say against her jaw. “Right here. Right now.”
“Then take me.”
I stand and pull her to her feet. I touch the dress, and I stop.
The way the fabric clings to her body in lines that are technically modest and functionally ruinous.
I have spent the last hour holding her on a dance floor while whispering exactly what I intended to do to her, and now that the moment is here, I find that I want to slow down.
I want to give this the attention it deserves.
“This fucking dress,” I growl, running my fingers along the neckline where the fabric meets her collarbone.
The living fabric responds to my touch the way everything in the Verdance responds, by reading intent.
The material parts where my fingers press, splitting along seams that were invisible a moment ago, falling open across her shoulder and down her arm.
I follow the opening with my mouth, kissing the bare skin as it appears, and the contrast between the warm fabric and my mouth makes her shiver against me.
I move to the other shoulder. The dress parts again, and I take my time with this side too, tracing a line from her shoulder to her collarbone with my lips.
Then down. The fabric splits along the center of her back, and the dress slides forward, and I catch it at her waist with both hands while I press my mouth to the back of her neck.
“I could keep you like this for hours,” I murmur against her spine. “Half dressed, shaking under my mouth.”
“You could try.”
I let the dress fall. It pools around her feet on the luminous moss.
She’s standing in nothing but the light of the chamber and her marks, which glow gold against her skin like a second layer of clothing that I intend to worship with my hands and my mouth and every other part of me that belongs to her.
I walk around her. Slow. Taking her in from every angle, cataloguing every line and curve and golden mark with the focused precision of a man who has crossed realities to get back to this body, this woman, this exact configuration of skin and light.
“Turn around,” I say.
She turns. The pool is behind her, the steam rising in thin curls through the aurora light.
I strip. Fast, nothing performative. The suit comes off in pieces that I don’t bother tracking where they land, because there is exactly one thing in this chamber that warrants my attention and she is standing in front of me glowing like something the Verdance made specifically to destroy me.
I walk her backward. Step by step, gripping her waist, guiding her toward the pool. The moss is warm and soft under our bare feet. The steam thickens around us. When her heels touch the edge of the water, I lift her and carry her in.
The water is hot. Not scalding but deep, aching heat that sinks into the muscles and loosens things I didn’t know were tight. It comes to her waist when I set her down. I stay behind her, my chest against her back, my arms around her waist, and the water laps at us in slow warm waves.
“The spring is fed by the Heartwood’s root system,” I tell her, my mouth against her ear. “The water is infused with Bloom magic. It heightens sensation. Makes the skin more sensitive.”
“Did Thalia tell you that too?”
“I am choosing to believe she mentioned it in a tactical context and not a parental one.”
She laughs, and the sound echoes off the curved roots above us, and the flowers on the walls pulse in response.
I turn her to face me. The water is between us, hot and silky, and my hands slide up her sides beneath the surface.
Wherever my fingers press, the Bloom-infused water intensifies the touch, amplifying the sensation until I can feel her whole body tighten.
She gasps, and the sound goes straight through me.
“Feel that?” I say. “The water makes everything more.”
“I noticed.”
“Good. Because I intend to use that.”
My mouth finds hers. The kiss is slow and thorough.
I take my time under the water learning every curve and line all over again with this new amplification.
Finding every place where the heightened sensitivity makes her twitch and gasp and grab hold of my shoulders to stay upright. The hot water laps at our skin.
I lift her out of the water. One motion, gripping under her thighs, and I carry her to the edge of the pool where the thick moss grows right to the waterline. I set her on the edge, her legs still in the water, and drop to my knees in the pool in front of her. The water comes to my chest.
“Lie back,” I tell her.
She lies back on the moss, her hair spread around her and her marks blazing, and her chest rising and falling with the rapid rhythm of someone who knows exactly what I’m about to do.
I push her thighs apart. The Bloom-infused water is still on her skin, every nerve ending amplified, and when I press my mouth against the inside of her knee I feel her entire body respond, her back arching off the moss.
“The water,” she gasps. “It makes everything feel like—”
“I know.” I work up her thigh with my mouth, and each kiss lands with an intensity that makes her hands fist in the moss beside her. “That’s why I brought you here.”
I reach the place where her thigh meets her hip and I stay there, breathing against her, gripping her hips to hold her still.
The Bloom water is on my lips, my tongue, and when I finally put my mouth where she needs it, the amplified sensation tears a sound out of her that fills the entire chamber and bounces off the roots overhead.
“There she is,” I say against her, and the vibration makes her vision blur. I can see it in the way her eyes lose focus, the way her golden marks flare so bright they compete with the aurora. “I want to hear that again. Louder.”
I give her no choice. The Bloom water amplifies every stroke, every press, and I use that amplification thoroughly.
Her hands fist in the moss. The flowers on the walls bloom in cascading waves that race toward the ceiling.
The golden glow of her marks flares and pulses and I can feel the echo of her pleasure, a mirror of sensation that feeds back into my own body and makes my hands shake against her thighs.
The first one hits fast and brutal. Her whole body locks up, her hips lifting off the moss, and I hold her through it, my mouth on her thighs, not stopping, drawing it out, using the water’s amplification to keep the waves rolling until she’s shaking and oversensitive and pushing at my head.
I don’t stop.
“One more,” I say, and slide two fingers inside her while my mouth continues. The Bloom water makes the internal sensation devastating, every nerve magnified, and I find exactly the right place with a precision that I have earned through devoted study.
“I can’t,” she gasps. “Kaelren, I can’t—it’s too much.”
“You can. You will.” I curl my fingers and press harder with my tongue. The second builds on the first, climbing from the wreckage of the last one. I don’t even think. I turn my head, and bite.
She screams, and it breaks her apart so thoroughly the moss blazes gold, flowers explode open, and the aurora overhead pulses in time with her heartbeat.
She is nothing but light, nerve endings, and my name spilling from her mouth in sounds I’ll remember on my deathbed and in every life after this one.
I lap up the blood on her leg, and gently kiss the mark.
I climb out of the pool. Water runs off my body in rivulets that glow faintly from the Bloom infusion. I crawl over her on the moss, and the weight of me pressing her into the warm ground makes her body go loose and pliant beneath me.
“Hi,” I say.
She laughs. It comes out wrecked and breathless. It’s the best sound I have ever heard. “Kaelren, what was that?”
I marked you. I made you officially mine. Now no one will question whose body and soul you own in return.