chapter fourty-eight
elysia
The rest of the night settles over the camp like a heavy blanket.
After the funerals, we all gathered for our meals, though what little we cooked up was barely touched.
Once the silence became too much, we all whispered hollow and exhausted goodnights, and most of the squad drifted quickly into what I’m sure will be broken sleep with grief still thick in the air, heavy and suffocating and impossible to escape.
I couldn’t sit with it.
Not when Varo’s blood still stained my skin.
Not when Sirena’s voice still echoed behind my ribs.
So I walked.
I let the forest take me, boots crunching softly through snow as pale light guided my steps. The trees rose tall, their dark trunks veined with climbing fluorescent vines that glowed faintly beneath frost and ice, casting soft ribbons of colour across the white ground.
Beneath the snow, flowers still breathed with dim light. Petals dulled but alive, stubborn things that refused to die no matter how deep winter pressed.
When I found a starlight spring… a pool of glacial-blue water, frozen over and glittering beneath the moon, I slipped away and melted the ice with a sweep of fire, warming the pool until steam coiled into the cold night air.
Now, I strip off my ruined clothes, the winter air biting for half a heartbeat before I step into the water and let the heat swallow me whole.
As I move deeper into the spring, the blood loosens, but my throat doesn’t.
Footsteps crunch through snow, and I don’t need to turn to know who it is.
Kaden’s silhouette stops at the edge of the spring, the glow from the trees turning his wet lashes silver. Wordlessly, he undresses, every movement slower than usual, as if grief weighs down even his bones.
He says nothing as he walks into the water, stopping beside me. I turn to him, lifting a slow, cautious hand to his cheek, cupping his face as my thumbs brush the moonlight beneath his eyes.
“Are you okay?” I whisper.
Those mismatched irises finally meet mine as he shakes his head once. A soft kiss grazing my palm, tender and broken.
“No,” he breathes. “But Thane is worse. I don’t… have time to fall apart. He needs me.”
“Kaden,” I murmur, stroking his jaw. “Everyone is allowed to grieve. Even you.”
He swallows hard but doesn’t respond.
“Come on, let’s wash this blood off,” I whisper, placing a soft kiss on his lips.
Together we wash the blood from each other’s skin in slow and comforting motions, as if we’re both touching something fragile, touching something that could shatter from a single breath.
His fingers slide through my hair, delicately rinsing out the crimson.
I clean the dried stains from his chest, his shoulders, his arms and his impossibly soft hair as the silence hangs between us.
Not empty, but warm and embracing.
After a long moment, his hands drift upward, gliding over my shoulders and up the column of my throat, then cradling my face.
“I love you,” he whispers quietly.
Like the words cost him something to speak.
Like he’s afraid they’ll break him open.
“What?” I whisper.
“I’m in love with you,” his words whisper against my lips. “I have been since the night under the wisteria tree… but if I’m honest with myself, it was earlier than that.”
His thumb brushes my cheek, tender and gentle.
“I think I started falling the moment you held your dagger to my throat. You weren’t afraid of me; you weren’t scared.
You looked into my eyes, defiant and stubborn, and something in me just…
gave. I fell for you in an instant.” His breath catches, “and now, everything before you feels like a half-life. I didn’t realise how muted my world was, how long I’d been living in greyscale until you looked at me…
moonlight made flesh, lighting every shadow I thought I was doomed to live in. ”
His forehead presses to mine, voice breaking open. “You, Elysia Morningstar… you are my light. My lifeline. And gods…” he exhales, “I love you with every dark, corrupted piece of me.”
My breath catches, and my heart swells.
His confession is so raw and so vulnerable that it knocks the air right out of my lungs. His eyes burn into me, misted with adoration and equal parts anxiety.
I rise onto my toes, water rippling around my moving body as I place a soft kiss on his bottom lip, “I love you, too.”
Relief floods through him so strong I feel it as if it were my own. His shoulders sag as the tension eases, his breath steadies against my cheek, and his heartbeat calms inside my chest.
“Don’t say too,” he murmurs against my lips, smiling ever so slightly. “It sounds like you’re just agreeing with me.”
A soft laugh escapes me, brittle but real, and I brush my thumb along his lower lip.
“I love you, Kaden,” I breathe. “With every fibre of my being.”
Something inside him breaks and mends all in the same heartbeat, then his mouth crashes onto mine.
One arm winds around my waist, dragging me flush against the solid lines of his body, the other sliding to the nape of my neck, guiding and tilting until his mouth covers mine.
The kiss deepens, not just passionate but aching, a collision of need and grief and the desperate urge to feel something other than the hollowness in our chests.
It’s claiming and broken and hungry all at once.
The spring sways around us, warm and shimmering beneath the moonlight, like captured stars swimming beneath each ripple, steam curling like silk around our bodies.
The world outside ceases to exist.
It’s only him. Only us.
Two shattered souls holding each other together.
He pulls away, gasping and lifts me by the back of my thighs, wrapping me around his waist. His lips meet mine again in a ravenous, desperate kiss as his hands roam every inch of me, as if committing every dip, and curve and groove to his memory.
His skin against mine feels impossibly right, and fire surges through my veins in a rush of heat with every touch and caress.
His mouth breaks from mine, placing feather-light kisses along my neck as his hands splay at my waist, steady and unmoving.
Then, without warning, the tip of his cock pushes into me, and I gasp.
“Kaden…” I breathe, shock lacing my tone. “We can’t…this isn’t what you need—”
“This is exactly what I need.” His voice is barely a whisper as his hands tighten around my waist. “Please, Love. I need this, I need you… I need us.”
The broken plea in his voice splinters something deep inside me. It’s so raw and so unguarded that my heart aches with the weight of it. He’s reaching for something… anything that might soften the jagged edges of his grief.
If this is what he needs… if I’m what he needs, then I will give it freely. I will be anything and everything for him, because I know without question, he would do the same for me in a single, desperate heartbeat.
My thumb trembles as it brushes his cheek, the closeness of him stealing the breath from my lungs. His grief presses against mine, heavy and breaking.
I lean in until our foreheads touch, until our breaths tangle, and there is no space between his aching heart and mine.
“Kaden…” my voice cracks, soft but fierce, “there is nothing… nothing, I wouldn’t give you. No part of me I would ever hold back. If you need this, if you need me… now, tomorrow, a year from now. Then I am yours to lean on. I will be the place you fall when the world shatters.”
I press my lips to his in a slow, reverent kiss. Pouring everything I cannot articulate into it. Then, through the bond, I breathe the truth into him like a vow.
“I am irrevocably yours.”
His heart skips at my words; I feel it as surely as I feel my own, and as our mouths begin to tangle in an aching kiss, his hands push me slowly down the impossible length of him.
The intrusion steals the breath from my lungs, and that familiar burn ignites as I accommodate to the incomparable perfection of him.
His hips rock as he thrusts into me in a slow, gentle and dizzying rhythm. Every stroke laced with the need for each other, for release, for one fleeting moment where the world doesn’t hurt.
He drives me higher and higher, building that tight coil of pleasure at my core painfully tight until I can’t string together a single coherent thought. The water ripples around us as our bodies move together, the night echoing with our soft gasps.
The taste of us is a balm, the spark of skin on skin a reminder that we’re still here, still alive…
despite the hurt. The way our bodies fit together feels less like desire and more like refuge, two aching hearts finding the only place that still feels safe, stitching each other back together with every touch.
My legs begin to shake with every slow and passionate thrust, and stars begin to prick the edges of my vision as my climax builds. My breath catches, my heart hammers and then as his mouth leaves mine and nips at that sensitive spot, I tumble right over the edge of pleasure.
Fire ignites beneath my skin, warming the spring around us as my orgasm washes through me in a pure wave of bliss. His hands tighten at my waist as my walls flutter around him, and the answering groan that leaves his throat is deliciously primal.
“Gods… look at you. You take my breath away every damn time.”
My lips find his as he works me towards another orgasm, his hands gripping my waist and moving me along the length of him at a brutally slow pace.
I draw back just enough to look at him… really look.
Moonlight carves along the sharp line of his jaw, glints off sweat beading at his temple. His brows are drawn in that familiar, devastating focus. Those mismatched eyes shifting in hues of greens and blue, fixed on me like I’m the only thing tethering him to this world.
“So. Very. Beautiful.” I breathe, punctuating each word with a kiss.
His lips ravenously reclaim mine as his pace picks up, just slightly. Edging us both higher and higher.
I draw his lower lip between my teeth, sucking gently and then nipping as he drives into me.
His voice wraps around my mind, deep and carnal. “You’re killing me, love.”
My tongue swirls with his as his hips pick up their pace, matching our erratically beating hearts as we melt beneath each other’s touch. Then his presence wraps around my mind, cedar wood and shadow, darkness and starlight.
Every thrust is impossibly perfect as I sink into her, again and again. Her skin, her scent, her voice, her presence. It’s all a soothing balm against my shattered heart, a light in the ever-growing darkness surrounding me. She tastes like home, she feels like home.
My hips drive into her, and my head swims at the feeling, every tight inch squeezing and coaxing until I’m on the brink of madness. She throws her head back as her walls flutter around my cock.
Fuck, she’s so close, she’s so perfect.
“Kaden!” His name tears from my lips as pleasure grows painfully tight in my core, then when he slams home, hitting that sweet spot deep inside me, I unravel.
“I love you.” My voice is a breathy whisper through the link.
“Fuck, Elysia.” His muscles tense, then with one last thrust, his entire body shudders.
His mouth claims me in a frantic kiss, his tongue expertly moving against mine with each moan as his climax rolls over him.
A few heartbeats pass, and he withdraws with slow reluctance, placing a soft, lingering kiss on my lips, arm still wrapped tight around my waist.
Steam curls around us like drifting silk, moonlight glazing his skin in silver, stars flickering in the sky above us.
Kaden pulls back only slightly, his hand coming up to cradle my jaw, thumb brushing the swell of my cheekbone with devastating gentleness.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he whispers, the words raw and stripped of all the armour he usually carries. “Not to battle. Not to fate. Not to anything.”
My heart aches at the truth in him, the boy beneath the warrior, terrified of a world without the person he’s finally allowed himself to love.
“You won’t,” I say softly, pressing my forehead to his. “I’m here, Kaden. I’m not going anywhere. Not while I still have breath in my lungs and fire in my veins.”
His breath shudders out, relief and fear tangling together. He pulls me tighter against him, “Good,” he murmurs, voice muffled and trembling. “Because I don’t think the world could survive what I would become if this...” His thumb presses gently against my pulse, “Ever stops beating.”
I hold him, fingers threaded through his damp hair, letting the quiet honesty of the moment settle between us.
“Then it’s a good thing you’re stuck with me,” I whisper, brushing a soft kiss against his lower lip. “In this lifetime and any other that dares to follow. Across every universe that could exist, I’ll always find my way back to you, Kaden.”
A small, broken sound leaves him before he kisses me again, gentle and aching, a promise etched into my soul… our soul.
Eventually, we pull ourselves from the water, the winter air nipping at our skin as we dress in what are now clean and surprisingly dry clothes.
We walk back toward the camp together, fingers laced and the forest quiet. The grief is still there, but for the first time since the battle… it doesn’t feel like it’s swallowing us whole.
When we slip beneath our blankets, Kaden pulls me into his chest, arms banded tight around me as though he’s anchoring himself to life.
I press a kiss to the hollow of his throat and whisper a soft goodnight, then with his heartbeat echoing steadily in my chest, we finally let sleep take us… wrapped in each other, fragile and exhausted, but together.