Chapter 44 #2
He touches my neck and slides his fingertips along my throat, sending a hard chill tumbling down my spine. He tugs the thin fabric of my gown aside, revealing the rune he cut into my body. Tenderly, he presses his warm lips to the skin just below the wound.
It takes my breath, that kiss. The reverence. The connection.
He pushes my hair behind my ear. “I’ve worried all day that you might hate me for this.”
I shake my head. “Should I?”
“Maybe. Unless we reverse the rune, you will always be tied to me. Your heart will seek to find me until your last breath. And that was not something I had the right to do.”
“Reverse the rune?” I sign.
“It’s a ritual of sorts,” he says. “If you decide you want that, just tell me.”
I touch the mark on my chest. Then I untie his tunic and pull it open, drifting my fingertips over his rune.
“We were already connected,” I sign. “Because of the death I stole. I feel it. And I feel you. Inside me. That bond would not let go in the Shadow World. You were my tether, even before the rune.”
He looks perplexed by that. “And do you have this bond with Helena? You saved her, too.”
“I feel her little death inside me, yes. But there was a difference when I was in the Shadow World. Perhaps because you were the one trying to bring me back.”
“Or because I’ve been to the Shadow World myself.” He holds my stare for a long moment, like he’s curious, then returns his hands to my hips, fingers tight, the closeness between us thick and tempting. “You’re doing it again,” he says, the smallest of smiles tipping one corner of his mouth.
I frown. “Doing what?”
“Looking at me like you want me to kiss you.”
I slip my arms around his neck and thread my fingers through his hair once more. If I’m obvious, so be it.
Alexus closes his eyes, a weary moan sounding from the back of his throat. When he looks at me again, I lean closer, ready to be brave, to give in to what we both want.
But he stops me.
“I need to tell you something important.”
I can’t help but pull back and exhale a shuddering sigh. I know this tone.
“How can there be anything else to tell?” I sign. “I do not want more dread. I just want you.”
“Raina.” His eyes look so sad, and his voice is so pained. “I want you, too. More than you can possibly imagine.”
I take a shallow breath. If this is what he needed to tell me, then stars and gods, I’m ready. But he keeps going, and that tone is still there, threading through his voice like each word is a punishment to speak.
“I want to lay you down by the fire and make love to you for the rest of this night,” he says.
“I want to wipe away every thought from your mind except thoughts of pleasure. But just like in the wood, I can’t let that happen until I’ve been honest with you.
There’s one thing I didn’t tell you in the cave.
One thing you need to know about me. Especially now. ”
I’d thought of him as such an open book, even considered that there were pages and lines I simply hadn’t had the time to read yet, chapters I wanted to lose myself inside. Just moments ago, I wanted this, to learn more about him.
And yet, nothing about this moment feels like I thought it might.
He brushes his fingertips across my temple. “Remember when I told you the story of Colden and Fia? Remember his friend?”
I nod, wondering whatever came to be of the man from the valley, and hoping beyond hope that a man from centuries earlier has nothing to do with us.
“A handful of years after the gods died,” Alexus says, “that friend traveled back to the Summerlands to see the queen. He was in a dark place, and guilt that he’d played a role in Colden’s curse had overcome him.
Had he not persuaded Colden to go to that celebration, he and the queen would never have come together.
The man from the valley unknowingly walked the man who would become his dearest friend into a circumstance that turned Colden into a being with ice in his veins and frost on his breath, a thing that could never see or touch the woman he loved ever again.
Everything—even his humanity—had been taken from him.
” Alexus pauses, and his throat moves hard.
“Fia agreed to see the friend. He asked her to help him live forever, so that he might show his loyalty to his new king and be worthy of forgiveness. He felt he had nothing left in this world. Honor was all.”
Emotion wraps around my throat. Another puzzle, though already too clear.
“In her worry for Colden,” he continues, “the queen advised that the friend seek the most powerful clan of her magi, in the mountains near her city. He did, and though they couldn’t grant him immortality, they could bind him to someone else’s eternal life.
His wife and son had been killed in a recent attack on their village, so he let the magi work their magick.
” He pauses, emptiness smothering the vivid light of his eyes.
“I haven’t left the service of Colden Moeshka since. ”
It takes a moment for his words, clear and direct as they are, to soak into my mind. I think back to seeing him at the stream, the way he knew about releasing the stardrops for the dead, the way his face darkened every time he mentioned Colden’s friend.
He’s immortal. Something I knew, in a sense. He’s Un Drallag the Sorcerer. Alexi of Ghent, the prince called him. I knew he’d been alive for three hundred years. I just haven’t had time to wonder why.
“This is not news,” I tell him, trying on a weak smile.
“I suppose not, but eternal life for me is very different, Raina. I’m bound to Colden’s immortality.
The magi who created the spell work between Colden and I are dead and gone, and their unified magick is still strong.
There is no undoing it that we have found. Are you understanding what I’m saying?”
My chest tightens, and I feel sick, though the sudden flood of emotions attacking me makes no sense. It’s as though my body knows something my mind has yet to grasp.
“No, I do not understand. You and I are bound—”
“Yes, but the bond we share is only a connection. A link. If I lose my life, you do not lose yours. For Colden and me…We are two halves of the same whole, Raina. My immortality only goes so far as the king’s.”
There’s no keeping the truth from sinking in now.
“No.” The word forms on my fingers without thought. I sign it again and again as understanding rattles my heart.
Alexus stands and takes my face in his strong hands.
The look in his eyes and the expression twisting his handsome features answer every question racing through my mind, sealing my heart in cold dread.
I close my eyes and search for the threads of his life, expecting to see them as they should be now that Neri is gone from him.
But no. Alexus still bears multiple threads. Glimmering shadows.
Colden’s life. And now mine.
I pull away from him and flee the room, unsure where I’m going. The fear of losing a man I only recently came to know should not hold so much power over me, yet it consumes. The cresting wave rises, and this time, it’s going to sweep me under.
No wonder Colden and Nephele didn’t seem worried about Alexus’s life on Winter Road. He’s bound to the Frost King unto death. If Colden Moeshka loses his life at the hands of the Prince of the East or anyone else, he will take Alexus with him.
And there won’t be a damn thing I can do to stop it.