35. Drusilla #2
He comes to stand next to her on the balcony, his own hip flush to the railing. The distance between them, no matter how small, physically hurts. Her fingers ache to reach out and wrap her arms around him, to feel him beneath her touch.
He reaches for her instead, gently moving her tangled mess of hair back over her shoulder. The callouses on the tips of his fingers brush her neck, her shoulder; she shivers and her stomach drops.
“There’s nothing you could do or say that would make me turn you away. Especially something this important.” He places his hand on the rail, close to her arm. “What was her reason for telling you now?”
“She said I could have humming magic, like the rest of the Tredici. Like Cato.”
He nods, brow pinched in thought.
“What else did she say to you?” he asks after a moment.
Dru glances down at her bare feet, not wanting to meet his eye. She considers telling him about the dragon, but she’s having trouble believing it herself. And it’s not exactly easy to explain.
“That tomorrow will be the most difficult day I’ve faced in my life,” she says, meeting his gaze again. “It’ll destroy me if I let it.”
“It will be difficult,” he confirms. “There can only be two winners, and Cato must be one of them.”
She swallows, knowing the truth of it in her heart. One of them will likely die tomorrow. Maybe both of them, given one winner must be from the Imperium.
She looks away, staring at one of the thicker red veins in the marble floor. “Well, at least there’s a possibility you’ll be rid of me soon.”
Marcus silently brushes the sensitive skin beneath her chin, and she glances up at him. Sincerity shines from his bright eyes, brow furrowing with concern.
“Dru, I—I don’t know if I can live in a world where you don’t exist,” he admits, his hand grazing the back of hers before bringing it back to his side.
She lets out a short breath through her nose.
“All the time I spent away from you, I endured it knowing you were trained well enough to survive. If you hated me for what I said to you, if I could never see you again, I’d find a way to survive in that world. But…”
He bows his head and trails off, loose hair hanging in front of his face in blackened tendrils.
Dru swallows hard at his unfinished confession. Without saying it in so many words, he’s admitted what she wanted— needed —to hear him say. This might be her last chance to let Marcus in, to tell him how she feels.
Even if doing so destroys her.
Removing her grip from the balcony railing, she steps close enough to him that he has no choice but to look at her. His one hand flexes on the railing, the other straight at his side. She holds his gaze, hoping he’ll understand the depth of what she’s about to say.
“The only reason I have been able to survive this world is knowing you were somewhere in it. Even though I believed you’d betrayed me, that you didn’t feel for me the way I felt for you.
” He opens his mouth to say something, but she takes a step forward and places a gentle thumb over his lips, her hand resting on his jaw.
“At least you were alive. At least, one day, I might see you again.”
Blatant longing flashes across his face, deepening his gaze and flaring his nostrils.
He closes his eyes, sucking in a shaky breath between his lips, his chest heaving with the effort.
Her own breath grows shallow—she doesn’t think she’s mistaken his feelings for her, but once she does what she’s about to do, there’s no turning back.
Removing her thumb but keeping her hand on his cheek, she arches into him, her chest grazing his. His eyes wrench open at the contact, searching her face. Every single part of her body aches, from the places they’re touching—and the places they’re not.
Before she can question if she’s making the worst mistake of her life, she tips her head back and presses her lips to his.
Marcus doesn’t hesitate, destroying any uncertainty left inside her heart.
Oh, stellae .
He wraps his arms around her and pulls her to him, moving his lips against hers with a hard, hungry desperation she can only attribute to knowing this might be their first and last night together.
Or maybe it’s because they’ve been dancing around this moment since the festival.
Before that, if she’s being honest—since he pressed himself against her to hide them from the soldiers at the tabernae.
She throws her arms around his neck so that her nightgown rides up as their kiss deepens, reveling in the way he holds her to him. As if he can never get close enough.
With their bodies pressed so firmly together, the thin pieces of fabric between them quickly become untenable. The muscle of his chest and stomach flex through his tunic, and she wants it gone. She wants to be with him, to have nothing left unsaid or unfelt between them.
He presses into her, and she finds herself flush against the alcove wall of the balcony.
His hands gently drag down her back and her sides until they grip the space between her waist and her hips, his skin hot against hers.
She sucks in a breath at the contact, heat igniting in all the places he touches her, the rest of her aching fiercely from his absence.
Drawing her close again, he grips the fabric of her nightdress, pressing his fingers into the soft edges of her hips.
He angles his head slightly and flicks his tongue inside her open mouth.
A soft, quiet moan escapes her throat as she does the same, her body arching into him while the more sensitive parts of her ache deeper and deeper.
She’s been with men before as part of her duty. That’s all it’s ever been for her: a duty to the Faithless, to complete her orders by any means necessary. But each time she was with those men, she thought of him.
It’s always been Marcus. Even when she thought she hated him for all those years, she loved him.
Which is why she doesn’t stop him when he slides a hand up to her shoulder and deftly pulls down the strap of her nightdress, then the other. The material slides along her body and pools around her feet on the cold marble floor.
Carefully leaving her lips, he takes a step back. Her pulse pounds through her body as he takes her—all of her—in.
Using the concave wall to remain upright, she can’t help recalling all the physical scars left along her skin, a complicated map to her treacherous past. All the Faithless have scars, but many of hers were earned in the years she and Marcus spent apart. What will he think of them?
He meets her eyes and his own bare the depths of his soul. She finds understanding and longing and something deeper…
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
She can’t help smiling, biting her bottom lip to stop it from spreading too wide. “Seen many of them, have you?”
“I never saw them,” he admits seriously. “Not as I see you now.”
At his words, her entire body yearns for his, but she doesn’t want to rush this. Not with Marcus. She wants to savor every possible moment with him because she might never get the chance to do so again.
Pushing off the wall, she takes a step forward.
“Let me see you then,” she says, voice shaky.
One side of his lips tips up playfully. “Fair’s fair.” He reaches for the back of his tunic and pulls it over his head.
Her lips part, and her breath wooshes out of her. What she saw of him after his run that one day and at the crystal pools left little to the imagination. But now, with nothing on, she realizes not even her own mind could’ve conjured this.
She takes another step toward him, but he flinches. Apprehension sneaks into his gaze.
Confusion and embarrassment muddy her thoughts. “Marcus?—”
“Don’t,” he breathes, not looking at her anymore, his hands clenched into fists. “I can’t—if we do this, there’s no going back. And I can’t lose you again.”
Standing naked in front of the man she’s loved for nearly half her life, she fights against the mortification creeping up her neck at his denial of her.
But it’s not that he doesn’t want her. It’s that he thinks she doesn’t want him .
After all she said, all she confessed, he still doesn’t understand how much he means to her. That the thought of losing him tomorrow feels like someone’s peeling back her skin and pouring salt into it. She has to say it plainly, knowing he might not feel as deeply for her as she does for him.
“All this time, I tried to forget you. Told myself how I felt about you was fleeting and childish and meant nothing.” She tries leaning in again, and when he doesn’t flinch, she places a hand on his smooth chest, over his heart.
“But I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love you, Marcus.
When it wasn’t physically painful not to be near you.
These past six years spent apart have proved that to me. ”
He meets her gaze. Behind the desperate want, his blue eyes are torn—no, tortured —for reasons she can’t understand.
Instead of answering, he steps into her, placing a hand on her hip and another on her cheek. Heat spreads from where he touches her, and she forgets how to breathe for a moment.
His voice is rough when he speaks again. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted this. Wanted you.”
Not longer than I’ve wanted you.
Despite losing all sense of anything but his hands on her, she says, “It can’t have been that long. You made it clear all those years ago that you weren’t interested in me. Though at least you did the honor of letting me down easy.”
His hand flexes on her hip and his dark eyes fall to her lips. “Nothing about denying you was easy for me.”
She leans in ever closer, their bodies not quite touching. The space between them feels as if it’s stretched too thin, waiting to snap.
“What about now?” She grasps his hand on her hip and places it between her breasts, over her pounding heart. “Does this make it any easier?”