Chapter 55
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
AIRIK
Nora lay on Airik’s chest, sound asleep. He was still within her, where she gripped onto his cock in a lover’s embrace. He plunged his hands into her hair, bringing it up to cover his face. Smoke, grass, flower blossoms, and always, at the very root, her. The essence of his life now.
“The healing matrix,” Airik said quietly, knowing Lucky would hear wherever he was.
After several moments, the ooshi crawled to them from where he’d banished himself to, keeping his tail over his eyes as he dropped a packet of healing matrix beside Airik’s hand.
“You have no right to pass judgment on me,” Airik said to the horrified creature, ripping the packet open with his teeth. “I give her what she wants. Now go away and heal faster—you’re beginning to worry us.”
Lucky made a disappointed huff and then moved to a fair distance away from them, against the curve of the fountain’s walls.
When he settled, Airik turned back to Nora. His cheranna.
The word filled him with both overwhelming joy and absolute misery, knowing the future they faced. The Veynari did not forget a morazir, a bearer of the Sword of Ulliel.
He’d told Nora they now had forever, but as he rubbed healing gel onto her backside, an unsettling, lingering intuition brewed in his mind.
Something was incredibly wrong, but lucidity eluded him.
Ever since the Lemides, when all his equipment had failed at once, and even before then, when pieces of his armor or weapons would malfunction, it was as if death’s claws had hooked into him, intent on pulling him under.
The only way to shield Nora from his misfortunes would be to ensure no bonds existed between them. That she was nothing to him but a random human specimen, collected by coincidence.
Impossible.
How would he pretend not to need her in front of others?
He would fix this somehow. Bear any punishment to keep her. Even if he grew to resemble his father, covered from head to toe in all the oaths he’d broken.
As his father had done, Airik could use the vault to barter for more freedom. He was certain that with Nora under his arm, humming one of her songs, the lock would grant him access.
His stomach fluttered as he imagined bringing Nora to the last place he’d been somewhat happy for a very short while before her—the Jortag estate.
He’d take her into his boyhood room and show her the same ice mountains he’d gazed at through his window as a small child.
There weren’t many memories left from that time, but it didn’t matter—they’d make new ones.
Was this what his father had felt for his mother?
The same maddening instinct to keep Nora within the crumbling walls of an estate that Airik knew the Veynari would make his prison, as they’d made it his father’s.
Insisting that he stay close to the vault as punishment for what his ancestors had done—building a repository of illicit things and then locking almost everyone out except their own blood.
But…with Nora, the Jortag estate wouldn’t feel like a prison. It’d feel like heaven. A place where, if she wanted, he’d breed her in every room until they had a child.
So that they can take your child away, as they took you.
His fingers clenched Nora’s hair, his body flushed with red-hot rage at the thought of her or the child he would one day put into her being ripped away from him.
A blue light flashed across the sky, turning night to day. A high-pitched shriek dug into his ears as it descended over them. Lucky bolted up, then immediately collapsed onto his bad leg. Airik reached for him, grabbed his tail, and pulled him close.
No.
Unable to hear the whistle, Nora simply nudged Airik’s chest and wrapped her arms around him tighter.
“Calm,” Airik ordered Lucky, fixed on the light. Slowly, he rose, slipping out of her body with a terrible ache.
It can’t be, he thought hopelessly.
A drozekar, dispatched only to morazir, hovered over the city square, too large to fit without damaging buildings and releasing kudra.
Airik lowered himself behind the fountain wall, holding Nora’s head to his chest. Whoever the morazir was who was looking for them must’ve assumed he’d come to the city once they’d discovered the striker was empty on the cliff.
The back of his neck prickled with a piercing sensation.
An eerie silence, devoid of even insect song, stretched on as the drozekar paused, its neural engine no doubt rejecting the park as a suitable landing site.
It streaked back into the sky, its propulsion so powerful that windowpanes exploded, raining glass shards.
Lucky puffed his fur, covering them with his tail.
“Thank you,” Airik whispered to the creature, his tail trembling over them.
Everything will be all right.
But even the voice in his head shook.
Broken glass shuddered as the ground vibrated, then stilled. The drozekar must’ve made its final descent close by.
Airik’s heart shifted into a raging sprint.
His eyes burned. With Nora, he had only just felt the sun’s warmth again, and though the night from which he emerged had been far too long, the light still shone, brighter than he ever remembered it.
He held her closer, his fingers grazing the ridges of her spine and ribs, both a little more pronounced than when he’d first found her.
If she were awake, she’d tell him that all would be okay.
Before he woke her, he kissed each of her ten fingertips, then her eyelids, and finally her lips. “Wake up, demon eyes,” he said, brushing the tips of her lashes. “It is time to move.”
Making a small sound of discontent, Nora pushed up, looking around with drowsy eyes.
“Get dressed,” he said. “We need to leave.”
She blinked, still half-asleep. Fates hear him, he’d cherish each piece of her broken heart until one day she’d be ready to fit them back together. Though he hadn’t admitted it, he knew she already held his heart, whole and safe.
Airik used his sword’s gravity to clear a path through the glass for her. “Others have come. Another morazir. Put on your shirt. And your pants.”
Realization hit as she glanced at the broken glass, and she bolted upright. “The Veynari…are here?”
He wet a cloth and began to wipe her thighs, his stomach turning as his glow disappeared from her body.
They dressed, and when Nora bent to put on her slippers, Airik stopped her and knelt to do it himself. He squeezed the tops of her feet, so she’d look at him. “Nothing is going to happen to you,” he promised. “It will be okay.”
She pulled up the loose collar of her shirt, covering his bite marks. “What about you?”
Airik rose, then took her hand, letting the collar fall back against her shoulder. There would be no question as to what had made those marks on her neck. And if they checked her body, there would be at least a dozen more to find.
He groaned at the thought. Any hand reaching for Nora would be severed at the wrist.
“Let them punish me,” he said, lifting her chin. “It will be all right, cheranna. You are mine, and I will fix everything to keep you.”