Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
The shower is the only place in the House of Ruin where I can pretend I'm still just a person.
The water is too hot. I turned it up until it scalded, until my skin went red and protesting, because the burn is something simple.
Something that makes sense. Not the cold certainty of divine mathematics running through my skull, not the phantom echo of Kael's rage or Lysander's ache or the yawning void of Caspian's nothing.
Just water. Just heat. Just me, standing under a spray that pounds against my shoulders and runs pink where Kael's training split the skin along my left forearm.
Today was bad.
Not the worst day. The worst day was when I tried five bonds and bled from the nose while my eyes turned gold and Croesus begged me to stop.
But today was different. Today Seraph made me channel six bonds simultaneously while Kael charged at me with a flaming sword, and I had to redirect the combined power into a defensive barrier while my body screamed at me that this was wrong, that no human vessel was built for this, that I was burning out from the inside like a filament in a cheap bulb.
I held the barrier. Barely.
But afterward, in the ringing silence of the arena with marble dust settling around us and seven fallen angels staring at me like I was a bomb with a lit fuse, I felt the fear I'd been swallowing for days crawl up my throat and lodge there.
Eleven days. Eleven days until Heaven comes. And part of me, the fragile human still inside me somewhere wonders if it would just be easier to let them kill me. End this all now, it might at least save Croesus, and Seraph. They would guard Luna for me after I’m gone.
I brace my hands against the marble wall and let the water beat against the back of my neck.
The bathroom is enormous because everything in Seraph's house is enormous, all white stone and silver fixtures and mirrors that I've draped towels over so I don't have to see what I'm becoming. My reflection scares me now.
I'm not Raven anymore. Not fully. And the woman I'm becoming might not survive what's coming, and even if she does, she might not be someone Luna recognizes. The problem is I need her to recognize me. I need someone to look at me and still see Raven. Just Raven.
My hands are shaking. I press them harder against the wall and breathe.
Hold it together. You've held worse. You've eaten sins that made you crawl. You killed an archangel. You can stand in a shower and not fall apart because an army is coming and you're terrified and your body is changing and you might be dying and you might be becoming something worse than dead.
Hold. It. Together.
The door opens.
I don't flinch. I don't have to look. I know who it is the same way I know my own heartbeat. The bond between us pulses, gold and warm, the oldest connection, the first thread woven into my chest all those months ago in the House of Gold.
"I'm fine," I say without turning around.
Croesus doesn't answer right away. There’s a soft click of the door closing.
Then his footsteps on the marble, deliberate, with his leonine grace making every movement look like he owns the ground beneath his feet.
He stops somewhere behind me, close enough that I can smell him over the steam.
Amber and old incense. The scent that means safety.
That means his hands on me in the dark. That means the first person who saw me as more than a weapon or a tool or a debt to be collected.
"You're not fine." His voice is low. Not soft, exactly.
Croesus doesn't do soft. But there's a quality to it, the way he speaks when it's just us, when the negotiations and posturing fall away and he's just a man standing in a room with the woman he loves.
"Your shields have been down for the last hour. I felt all of it."
Shit.
I've been so careful. Weeks of practice, building walls inside my mind, learning to shield my emotions from the seven bonds humming in my chest.
But today's training burned through my reserves, and I forgot. Or maybe I just ran out of strength to keep pretending.
"How much did you feel?" I ask the wall.
"Enough." He's closer now. I can sense the heat of him at my back, the pull of him like gravity. "The fear. The grief. That thing you do where you catalogue everyone you love and calculate the probability of each of them dying in eleven days."
I close my eyes. "It's not a calculation. It's a list."
"It's a spiral. And you've been inside it since training ended."
"I'm handling it."
"You're standing in a shower shaking."
I hate that he can read me without being able to see me.
Hate that his blindness makes him more perceptive than anyone with functioning eyes.
He knows the pitch of my breathing when I'm scared.
He knows the difference between the way I stand when I'm strong and the way I stand when I'm performing strength.
Right now, I'm performing. And he knows it.
"Go away, Croesus."
"No."
"I don't need you to come save me from a bad day."
"I'm not saving you from anything." His voice shifts, drops lower, and there's an edge to it now.
Something that isn't concern. Something harder.
"I'm saving myself from lying in a bed two hallways away, feeling you drown through the bond, pretending I can't. I've been doing that for the past hour. I'm done."
The water runs down my spine. I still haven't turned around.
"If this is a pity visit, I don't want it."
"Does anything about me suggest pity?"
I turn then. Not because he asked. Because I need to see him, even through the steam.
He's standing just outside the shower's spray, still dressed in the black training clothes he wore today, his arms folded across his broad chest. Black hair falling across his forehead, the veins of gold catching the bathroom's silver light.
Bronze skin. Sharp jaw. Those gold eyes that see nothing and everything, pure molten metal from corner to corner, no pupil, no white, unnerving and beautiful in equal measure.
He's looking at me. Not seeing me the way a sighted person would.
Not cataloguing the way the water runs down my body or the bruises darkening on my ribs or the cut on my forearm.
But he's tracking me with that uncanny precision, reading the angle of my shoulders, the rhythm of my breath, the displacement of sound as the water hits my skin.
He knows I'm naked. He knows I'm looking at him.
And the expression on his face isn't gentle. Isn't soft. Isn't the careful concern of a man approaching a wounded animal.
It's hunger.
"I haven’t touched you in days," he says.
The words land somewhere below my sternum. "We've been training."
"That's not why." He unfolds his arms. Takes a step forward, into the edge of the spray.
Water hits his shoulders, soaking through the black fabric.
He doesn't seem to notice. "You've been pulling away.
Not just from me. From all of it. Locking down, shutting out, trying to separate the weapon from the woman. "
"Maybe that's what I need to do."
"Maybe." Another step. The water is running down his face now, plastering his dark hair to his temples, and he doesn't blink. "Or maybe you're terrified, and when you're terrified, you starve yourself of every good thing because you think you don't deserve comfort."
The accuracy of that hits like a fist.
"Don't psychoanalyze me."
"I'm not. I'm telling you what I see." He reaches out. His hand finds my jaw with that certainty he has, fingers curving along the line of bone, thumb settling against the corner of my mouth. The touch is warm despite the water. Possessive. His rings press cold against my wet skin.
"And what do you see?" My voice comes out rougher and a little gasping.
"A woman who's been holding the world together with her bare hands for so long she's forgotten that someone else is allowed to hold her.
" His thumb traces my lower lip. Slow. Deliberate.
"A woman who is about to fight a war and thinks she has to do it without flinching.
Without needing. Without letting anyone close enough to remind her she's still human. "
"I'm barely human anymore. You said it yourself."
"I said they were losing you. I didn't say I was." His hand tightens on my jaw. Not painful, but firm. Grounding. "I will never lose you, Raven. Even if every other part of you changes, the part that's mine stays mine."
"That's very possessive."
"I'm Greed incarnate. Were you expecting generosity?"
Something cracks in my chest. Not the careful, controlled fracture of a wall coming down. Something messier. Wetter. The kind of breaking that comes with relief, with the sudden, devastating understanding that you don't have to keep standing.
"I don't want a pity fuck, Croesus."
His eyes flash. Gold on gold on gold, molten and dangerous. His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my wet hair, and he pulls me forward until my mouth is an inch from his.
"Then it's a good thing," he says, his voice dropping to something dark and rough that sends heat pooling low in my belly, "that I don't do pity."
He kisses me.
Not gently. Not tentatively. Not the way you kiss someone who's been crying or someone you're trying to comfort.
He kisses me like he's staking a claim. Like his mouth on mine is a contract, binding and absolute, and the terms are non-negotiable.
His hand fists in my hair, tilting my head back, and his other arm wraps around my waist, pulling my wet, naked body flush against his clothed one.
The fabric of his shirt is soaked and rough against my bare skin, and the contrast makes me gasp against his mouth.