Chapter 32 Borrowed Breath
Borrowed Breath
The vision shatters around them, pieces of reality flying in all directions like a dizzying array of shooting stars.
Kailorien stumbles back a step, one hand clutching a nearby table for balance.
His breath comes fast, sharp—like he’s just surfaced from drowning.
Auryn stands at the center of the room, swaying, silver blood trailing from the corners of her eyes.
And then she looks at him.
Void, the way she looks at him.
Beyond his armor. Beyond his skin. All the way into his soul.
“Kail…” Her voice is hoarse. Hollow.
He doesn’t recall moving, but suddenly he stands before her, pulling her against him—into him. Her hands rise, find his face, fingers threading into the thick onyx waves of his hair. She is shaking. Sure. Terrified. Craving.
“I can feel you…” she says, “in my skin. I can feel every breath. Every...”
…thought.
He leans down. Our foreheads touch, eyes never breaking contact. Silver to blue, like foam within the ocean tide.
Auryn. My Auryn—his voice rumbles between Us. Not in sound. In Bond.
Her voice comes like an echo. Gentler, sweeter.
Kailorien…my heart…my breath…
We shiver in unison, panting, swaying.
“This want,” she whispers, “this need...it’s more than what you’ve shown me. It’s hotter. Darker.”
I don’t know if I can survive it.
You can. You will.
“Give into it.” His voice breaks on the words. “We’ll drown in it together.”
And then his mouth was on hers—urgent, starved. Lips melting. Moans and sighs passing between Us—a sacred language only We can understand.
One hand slides around her waist, pulling her flush against his chest, the other tangling in her braid. Holding her steady while he takes his time exploring every corner of her heat. She gasps into the kiss, welcoming his tongue, tasting him, relishing the flavor of need and lust and rapture.
That tether—the Bond—flares between Us, fever-hot.
His yearning lives within her fingertips. The heat of his thoughts under her skin. Answers to a thousand questions defined in the way his restraint had been shattering for months.
“Show me everything,” he rasps, breaking the kiss only long enough to breathe her name like an oath. “Your pain. Your strength. Your purpose. I never saw you clearly. Not once. Not until now.”
His hand splays over her back, guiding her down to the furs on the bed.
He kisses her again, softer this time, until she whimpers beneath him.
He draws her bottom lip into his mouth, grazing his teeth on the petal-soft flesh.
In return, she tastes her own skin, discovering her own beauty through his eyes.
Our lips. Our hands. Our breaths unite.
His hands nudge aside her tunic, tracing the edge of her ribs. He groans at the feel of his own calloused fingers on her skin, the shared sensations so powerful his vision darkens. She arches, body singing against his.
Our limbs tangle—clothes half-removed, kisses falling like droplets in a rainstorm. He worships every inch of her with trembling hands and hushed gasps. Knowing her. Seeing her. Finding her, shocked he’d never realized how lost he’d been without that knowledge.
“Auryn…if we go further—”
She silences him, her leg sliding along his hip, pulling him flush.
“I want you,” she whispers. “I want this.”
She rocks her hips against him as he shudders.
He reaches for the shoulder strap of her clothes.
Tears it as he yanks it aside in his haste to taste her.
She moans as his mouth settles over her breast, crying out when he takes it into his mouth.
His hips move against her core, his arousal straining against his pants.
She pulls the laces of his tunic open, revealing the span of his broad chest. When her hands stroke over his bare form, his runes burn white in response. Her own mana flares.
When he weaves his fingers with hers, Our union hums like a singular ethereal note between Our skin. The sensation is like fire in Our veins, a pulsing that unifies Our very heartbeats.
Our mouths meet. Slower. Deeper. As if the vision had shattered whatever walls had remained between Us. No hesitation now. No fear. Only need. Only Our new discovery of one another, two souls lost to time and space and longing.
Her hands tremble in his hair, his name a prayer on her lips.
“Kail…” she breathes. “Mark me.”
He freezes, panting. “What?”
Her thumb traces the ridge of his jaw, then slides lower, over his throat, his chest.
“My skin,” she whispered. “My body. My heart. I’m afraid this is a dream. That you’ll disappear and I’ll return to that cottage. To that quiet.”
If you stop touching me, I’ll suffocate. I’ll have nothing left.
Never.
He wills the word into being. Gives it shape. Threads it into a vow.
His hands explore—cradling, mapping. He presses adoring kisses to her neck, her collarbone, the hollow of her throat. His fingers find her, slipping against her welcoming heat—drenched, open, aching for him.
“Auryn,” he hisses, “you’re shivering like you want to be devoured.”
Her hips roll, confirming it. He nuzzles against her ear, biting until she mewls. She writhes beneath him as he eases his fingers into her, her hands clutching his shoulders, thighs wrapping around his waist like primal claiming.
“You want my touch this much?” His teeth graze her jaw, then her throat. “Then feel me. Feel everything.”
He thrusts his fingers deeper, grinding his palm to her aching center as his fingers work her into a frenzy. Her back arches, lips parting on a broken moan.
“Kail—”
“That’s it,” he murmurs into her skin. Come apart for me, starlight. Break. Let me hear it, claim it, taste it.
The Bond between Us screams awake.
Sparks of runelight flicker across his body. Across hers. He tears the tunic over her head. Pressed together, skin to skin, they melt into one another.
My starlight...my sweet Auryn.
The Bond pulses between them—no longer a thread but a roar. A wildfire howling across the Veil.
“You feel it, don’t you?” His voice cracks with the effort to not lose himself in her. “This thing between us…this Bond…it’s aching. It wants this. We want this.”
He hovers above her, lost in her and all she is. All she means. His thumb traces her mouth, red and swollen from kissing, biting, hunger. She shivers as his finger traces her tongue, rasps against her teeth.
Take me, Resh’Agar. Kailorien. My Kail. My breath.
“Part for me,” he says, pressing himself at her entrance, “open to me…beg for me. I’m going to ruin you, sweetfire. Ruin you until there’s nothing left but us.”
Her name leaves his mouth again, reverent and wrecked, as he pushes inside her—slow, deep, every inch stretching her open.
His eyes go wide. A strangled sound tears from his throat.
Her pleasure.
His pleasure.
Ours. One. The same.
He closes his eyes against the tide of sensation, basking in the way her voice breaks on a sharp cry of ecstasy.
We are as twin cups. One pouring into the next without borders, without end. One filling and the other being filled—without walls or boundaries.
“Kail…you feel like…light…”
He buries his face against her chest, inhaling her scent. Letting it wrap around him just like the walls of her body, her heart, her soul. But being inside her isn’t enough. He wants to take them higher, to sharpen the burn, to prime the ache for the inevitable cataclysm to follow.
And so, he sets a pace, sliding into her, then drawing back. Tilting her hips, angling her so he can reach the deepest parts. So he can forget they’d ever been separate at all.
She clings to him, shaking, calling his name.
Every cry shatters yet another wall, another thing that marks Us as separate entities. Soon, each of his thrusts is a moan, a wave of pleasure, a prism bending the shape of his very soul to what defined hers.
“So soft—so sweet—taking all of me—you feel like fate—like you were made to bring me to my knees—”
He pushes her hands above her head, Our fingers weaving together.
My Kail…
….my Auryn.
Can’t…can’t…I’m going to fall…
“Then fall,” he beckons, his voice low and fraying, “shatter for me—my Auryn...mine… mine.”
Mine to protect.
Mine to cherish.
Mine to worship.
Her body tightens around him, back arching, and the Bond—the Bond shatters with Us.
With recognition.
With home.
Kailorien experiences every tingle, every throb, everything—feeling her climax in his own body. Her pulse around his length, her cry in his throat, her pleasure detonating through his spine as if he’s the one unraveling.
And then he is.
His hands fist the furs beside her, his mouth falling open on a ragged, feral sound as he thrusts one last time, buried to the hilt.
And comes.
Comes like a storm breaking against the cliffs.
Like a warrior laying down arms after a thousand years of war.
Her name tears from him—his Auryn—as light flares between their bodies.
Runes ignite once again across his skin, across hers, casting patterns on the walls like a time ravaged starmap—long forgotten and now found, at last.
He feels everything.
Her release.
Her love.
Her ache to be his and her own.
And she feels his devotion, raw and monstrous and pure. That he would give all he is for her. All of it to the last thread of his being.
Their two magics meld as lovers, intertwined and interconnected as though always meant to be.
Until there is no Kailorien.
No Auryn.
Only Us.
Only Bonded.
The frenzy leaves Our minds and bodies, but We remain entwined, still joined—still boundless and inseparable.
He can’t move. Not yet. Not when her warmth still cradles him, still keeps him.
A breath. A heartbeat. A kiss. And a vow—all pass.
And time lapsed…
…and stilled.
When their breaths settled and their thoughts steadied, he shifted—eased out of her— drawing a soft protest from her lips.
Don’t go. Not yet.
I won’t. I’m here.