Chapter 30 #2
“You won’t hurt me,” I say, louder now. “You can’t hurt me. Because I’m yours, Thorne. And you are mine.”
The flames roar higher at my words.
The skull leans down, enormous, and terrifying, fire pouring from the hollows where his eyes should be.
I tuck my chin, take a breath that tastes like ash and lightning—and step closer.
My hands pass through the flames.
They should blister. Turn black. Peel away.
Instead, they tingle.
Heat licks along my skin like an eager animal, wild but… curious.
I keep going.
Up to the wrists. The forearms. Until I’m standing flush against his fiery chest, arms buried up to the elbows in the furnace of his being.
It feels like everything.
Like every calloused hand I’ve ever held on a stretcher, every life I’ve watched slip away, every moment I’ve run toward danger while everyone else ran from it.
Like I’ve been walking toward this exact inferno my whole life.
I grope blindly inside his chest, searching—not with fingers, but with something deeper.
The bond.
There.
I find it.
A heart made of flame and coal and something softer at the center. It thrashes under my spiritual grip, pounding wild and erratic, threatening to burn itself out.
I wrap my arms around it.
Hold it like I would hold a patient on the edge of panic, on the edge of death.
“I’ve got you,” I whisper, forearms shaking with the strain. “I’ve got you. Come back to me, Thorne. Please.”
The fire bucks.
It surges up my arms, searing through every vein. My back arches. A scream tears out of my throat—not of fear, but of too much.
Too much heat. Too much love. Too much everything.
“Please remember who you are,” I choke out, tears boiling on my cheeks. “You are Thorne. Lord of Fire. Demon Prince of the Broken Plains. Keeper of the Flame. My mate. My viyen. My heart. Come back to me.”
For a second, nothing happens.
Then—the world shifts.
The wildness in his heart flickers.
Then steadies.
The flames around us falter. The blinding light inside his ribcage dims from white-hot to ember-red.
His roar dies mid-sound, breaking off into a ragged exhale that rumbles through the ground and my bones.
Slowly, painfully—the giant skeleton begins to shrink.
Bones soften. Melt back into muscle and skin. Wings of fire fold inward, dissolving into sparking ash that the wind picks up and scatters across the camp.
I keep my hands where they are until the very last second.
Until the moment my palms are pressed not against a cage of living flame—but against the hot, solid chest of a man I love more than is probably healthy.
Thorne collapses to his knees in front of me, gasping, sweat, and soot streaking his face. His bone mask is gone. His eyes are his again—molten ember with that deep, aching gold beneath.
“Shula,” he rasps.
Then he folds forward and wraps his arms around my waist, pressing his forehead to my stomach like he did before in the camp. His whole body shakes.
I drag in a trembling breath.
“I’m here,” I whisper, tangling my fingers in his soot-damp hair. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”
Around us, the camp is eerily quiet.
The SoulTakers have been pushed back—at least for now. The soldiers stand frozen. The other Lords stare, all in varying states of shock, scorched and panting.
No one speaks.
Thorne tilts his head, cheek pressed to my thigh, eyes closed as if he can’t bear to look at me just yet.
“You reached into my fire,” he says hoarsely. “You held my heart in your hands. You could have been destroyed.”
“Yeah,” I say softly, brushing ash from his hair. “But that wouldn’t have helped anybody.”
I swallow past the lump in my throat.
“And anyway,” I add, voice shaking but sure, “your heart’s mine now. I’m not letting anyone—even you—burn it out.”
His hands clench at my hips.
Then, slowly, he looks up.
The whole world narrows to the heat in his gaze.
“Shula,” he murmurs, voice raw. “You came for me.”
“Of course I came.” I huff out something that’s half laugh, half sob. “What did you think, Lord of Fire? That I was going to sit in a library and knit while you burned yourself out saving the world?”
His mouth curves, just a little.
Not a smile.
Something fiercer.
“I think,” he says slowly, reverently, “that the Fates have outplayed me.”
I cup his face in my hands, thumbs smoothing soot from his cheekbones.
“No,” I whisper. “They finally did something right.”
He huffs out a breath that might be a laugh.
“I love you, my viyella. With every last ember, I love you.”
My heart squeezes. My breath catches. Tears prick my eyes, but he doesn’t let them fall.
Thorne cups my cheeks and I grab his waist. He leans into my touch like a man who’s walked through hell and finally finds home.
Then, he kisses me—a long, deep, devastating kiss.
And for the first time since the bond began, I feel it settle between us—not as a chain.
Not as a trick.
But as a promise.
We don’t know what comes next.
The war. Idris. The crown. The Vein.
But I do know this, whatever infernos wait ahead, we’re walking into them together.