31. Archer
Archer
This is… new… this… wanting to share. I fantasize about what it would be like to tell Saige everything.
To crack open my bleeding chest and show her the mess within, to spill every dark thought, every nightmare to her, and see if she still stands there at the end of it all.
Sometimes I think I’m too far gone… that I don’t know where the old me ended and the new began…
When did one morph into the other? Was it in the dungeons of Gravereach with the lash of a whip and my reflection trapped?
Or was it before? On the battlefields of the Reckoning with black flames swallowing me whole?
For two centuries, I have listened to the buzzing of my own thoughts, churning, growing louder and louder.
They rise like a tide within me, some days retreating, just enough to let me breathe, just enough that I see a glimpse of light.
But then they rise again, creeping further up the sands of my mind until I am flooded, until I am treading water, struggling to keep my head above the surface.
And then… I am drowning in it, in the relentless waves of the most profound melancholy.
There is nothing but that, lapping at the lifelessness of me.
There have been times when I know I am meant to feel something, that some semblance of reaction is warranted, but all I feel is hollowness. An empty shell.
Until now.
Until her.
And now we are out of time. Tomorrow, we will retrieve the Confluence and so begins the final chapter of our journey together.
If all goes to plan, Saige will fix the book and deliver it where it needs to go, and then…
perhaps not now, but soon, I will say farewell to the mortal bookbinder and continue on.
I need to destroy Malevron, to liberate my brothers from Gravereach.
And yet all I want to do is hang on to this woman.
To selfishly drink in her presence, her light and take it for my own.
“Archer?” Saige is watching me from beneath the wisteria, and I realize that I’m staring into nothing, holding a bundle of firewood in my arms.
“I’m fine,” I manage, scooping a few more branches from the fallen leaves, trying to look busy, glad that my brother has made himself scarce.
She doesn’t buy it. Of course she doesn’t. “Where did you go just now?”
I don’t look at her as I continue my task, never mind that my arms are already overloaded. “Nowhere pleasant, Grayson.”
She doesn’t balk at my gruffness, she never does. Instead, she approaches and starts to take some of the wood from me. “Try as you might, you don’t scare me, General.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“I wasn’t offering.” Saige moves across the forest floor with purpose, gathering a combination of kindling and larger sticks.
For the most part, she ignores me as she works, but my traitorous body becomes increasingly aware of her closeness, of the addicting scent of her.
I track her movements, torn between that sickening urge to spill my guts to her, and the instinct to keep it all inside, to prevent whatever darkness taints me from infecting her as well.
It goes without saying that trust doesn’t come easily to me—it never did, and it certainly doesn’t now. And yet…
No one has perplexed me as much as the woman standing before me, the woman I cannot read to save my life. So I do something I never do. I ask.
“What is it that you want?”
She looks up from the stack of timber in her arms, surprised. “In life, or…?” There’s a small crease between her brows, as though she doesn’t quite believe I prompted the conversation.
“That’s a start, I suppose,” I reply.
There’s a brightness to her eyes as she responds.
“It changes,” she tells me. “Sometimes I’m so desperate for a cure to my pain that I think I could die from it.
On better days all I want is to pay off Thorne and be free of his clutches.
On worse days I wish he’d get hit by a supply cart and meet an untimely death. ”
“I can help with that,” I offer, watching her closely.
She laughs. “I’ll keep that in mind. Though I’m still in the middle of completing my first bargain with you.”
“Call this one a bonus.”
“I’ve been warned plenty of times about accepting gifts from the Azkari,” she replies with a smile before she continues.
“When life is calmer, what I want seems so simple. To run the bindery, to make beautiful books, to become a master, like Leo. Dare I say it… to be happy. Like I said, it’s different every day. ”
“And today?” I ask, finding it harder to breathe as I take a step closer.
“Today…” Her throat bobs as she swallows, meeting my gaze. “I want a lot of things today.”
“Tell me.”
She shakes her head, pink tinging the tops of her cheeks, her chest rising and falling with labored breath. “I won’t pretend there’s not something between us. And don’t you dare deny it either.”
“I’m not denying anything. Not anymore,” I murmur, my heart starting to pound.
“You said no emotional entanglements…”
“I did,” I concede.
“And now?” she presses.
“And now all I can think about is your mouth on mine.”
Saige’s throat bobs as she adjusts her grip on the bundle of firewood. “There are so many ways this could go, Archer.”
“There’s only one I care about.” And Triad save me, I know it’s going to hurt. I tried to stay away from her, to keep my distance. But Saige Grayson kept chipping away at my walls and armor until they were gone. Her radiant smile, her humor, her patience and her big heart… I never stood a chance.
Her gaze is penetrating, like she sees straight through my mask. “What happens when this is over? You return to your… people, I return to my bindery, and we pretend none of this happened?”
I don’t answer immediately. I’m too busy imagining the future she’s painted before us, where our bargain ends in nothing but an amicable handshake and a parting of ways. “Is that what you want?”
“I didn’t think what I wanted was part of your equation.”
It shouldn’t be. Not with Malevron after the Confluence, not with the fate Lorevael resting on my shoulders. My focus was supposed to be singular, an unyielding arrow shooting for its target. And yet, I grip my own supply of branches so hard some of them snap. “I asked, didn’t I? What if it was?”
She takes a step closer, a smile tempting the curve of her lips, lips I can’t seem to take my eyes off. “I don’t think you could handle it.”
I throw the firewood I’ve gathered aside, the sticks clattering to the forest floor and close the little remaining distance between us, my gaze locked on her perfect mouth as I say, “I can handle anything you’ve got, Grayson.”
My heart is hammering, and my hands are already drifting up her sides, my cock rock-hard and straining against my leathers.
“You think so, General?” she taunts, burrowing under my skin. “You really think you can—”
I grip her jaw between my charcoal-stained fingers, tilting her face to mine, savoring the heat that flares in her gaze.
If I was a selfless man, I’d be grateful for the time we’ve had together, for the bright spark she brought into my darkest days, and then I’d let her go.
She has earned a better life than this. Not spending the rest of her short years chained to a broken soldier who is unable to give her what she needs, what she deserves.
But I’m not a selfless man. “For once in your life will you shut up?”
Her answering grin is wicked. “Make me—”
I claim her lips with my own. I’m not gentle, but Saige is every bit as debaucherous as I am, opening for me, claiming me right back.
Her tongue brushes against mine and I groan into her warm, lush mouth, the sound vibrating in my chest, reverberating down my body.
There’s another rattling sound as she drops her own pile of wood and spears her fingers through my hair, pulling me down to her.
I kiss her like I own her, and Saige… Saige meets me right there, with a scrape of her teeth against my bottom lip, with the drag of her nails down the planes of my chest.
I want to touch her. Gods, I need to touch her.
And by the way her body is arching into mine, it seems she needs to be touched.
Enveloping her with my frame, I shift, and one of my thighs winds up between her legs, the heat of her radiating against me.
She tilts her hips, rubbing against me, and a soft moan breaks free from her lips.
It nearly undoes me. I want to know what other noises I can coax from her, the sound heating my blood in a way that no fire can.
My cock aches as I devour her, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I want to be touched.
It’s not just that. I want to be touched by her.
The urges that plague me now are primal and possessive, but I hold on to that last shred of willpower with everything I have as I slip my tongue back into her mouth.
Saige fists my shirt, the kiss becoming more urgent, more frenzied, and my fingers itch to reach for her buttons.
I want to feel her heated skin beneath my fingertips.
I want to taste the sweat between her breasts and feel her nipples harden beneath my touch.
I want, I want, I want… There it is. Desire, unchecked, uninhibited, and utterly wrapped up in the mortal woman who I can’t devour fast enough—
“Stop thinking so loudly,” she murmurs against my lips, grinding her core against my thigh. “I want you, Archer. I want this.”
I want, I want…
Desire hits me in waves that threaten to drown me.
The press of her body against mine. The taste of her.
The scent of her encompassing me. A craving opens wide inside me, and I can’t get enough of her lips, her tongue, her teeth.
I want to mark her as mine. I need to keep kissing her more than I need air. And it’s not just kissing I want.
She moans again and I close a hand around the delicate column of her throat, feeling that sound flush against my palm. I swallow the echo of her pleasure like a man starved.
It’s intense. It’s all-consuming—
Flame erupts from my fingertips, an obsidian blaze that causes Saige to jump back with a startled yelp.
It’s dangerous.
That’s the thing about desire… we tend to want the very thing that will bring about our ruin.
“This is what happens when I want something too much. This is why I can’t want this. My control is on the edge of a blade here…”
“Archer—” she’s reaching for me.
But the flames still burn and I step out of her reach. I turn my back on her, but despite my fire, Saige is there, and her hand wraps around my forearm. The flames snuff out like a candle caught in a sharp breeze. You think I would ever want an Azkari? Let alone one that bears that brand…
“Stop,” she commands. “I don’t want you regretting this already.”
“I can’t regret what hasn’t happened. Nothing—”
“Don’t do that,” she snaps. “That kiss wasn’t nothing.”
I do the only thing I can… I walk away, knowing she’s right.
The kiss wasn’t nothing.
It was everything.
I can’t stop myself glancing back at her, where she’s surrounded by discarded firewood, her lips swollen, her eyes bright.
My words come out rough and harsh, as though I’ve been chipped away at one too many times and the feelings are starting to seep through the cracks. And it’s ugly. It’s all so ugly, everything that spills from within. “You can’t fix me, Grayson.”
But Saige lifts her chin defiantly. “And you can’t break me, Archer.”