Chapter Twenty-Two
“Lunelle!”
A booming voice sent her back from the edge of the cliff, her fingers reaching for the ache as she righted herself.
She coughed, salty sea water spilling into her hands.
“Lunelle!”
Mirquios barked again, a rage within his voice that ravaged her bones. He rushed her, gripping her shoulders as he yelled in Mercurian, by the sound of his dipped vowels.
“Mirquios!”
She hit his chest, his eyes wide with harsh words.
He finally found the common tongue phrase he’d been searching for in his panic.
“Are you fucking insane?”
She glared and pulled away from him, but his hands only tightened.
“Do you have a death wish?”
She followed his eyes to the edge of the cliffs, the dark brown planes of his face deepened by his anger.
“I wasn’t going to?—”
“I don’t care,”
he hissed, shaking her.
“I don’t care if other people do it. I care if you—I care if you…”
His bright eyes flickered away, but she didn’t need to see them to know what they revealed.
“I was not trying to hurt myself!”
she explained, his hands still digging into her shoulders. She shrugged in an effort to loosen his grip, but he remained attached to her.
“I came here before and made an offering to Proserpina,”
she confessed.
“I thought perhaps she denied it because I was too afraid to jump, so I came back, but… it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter.”
She stroked the king’s chest, begging his heart rate to come down.
Mirquios inhaled slowly, his eyes closing as he stepped back, still unable to fully release her, though his fingers held less tightly.
“Arcas knows, Mirquios. He knows we’re both rebels. He wants the Lunar throne or he’ll tell the gods we’re bound?—”
“That fucking bastard!”
Mirquios rasped.
“I know,”
she said.
“I know, but… but I don’t know if I care.”
Perhaps her wish had been granted by the goddess, and she’d been too afraid to accept it the first time. Proserpina had to call in her own love to show her, to make her understand what exactly she was risking.
And what she could not risk.
She rested her hands on either side of his face, cradling him in a way she had not dared before, not even in her dreams.
“Lunelle,”
he warned, her touch too tender, too hard not to lean into.
“I cannot go the rest of my life without knowing.”
The glass wall Lunelle had kept him behind shattered into a billion glittering shards, crumbling across the shoreline as she moved into him. His eyes widened at her motion—he’d been certain she would stay on her side of their carefully maintained line until one of them finally Descended, but a single breath across it was enough to unwind every tortured knot in his muscles.
She’d imagined kissing him to be a slow, noble pursuit.
She’d imagined he’d need coaxing from that stronghold within him.
She’d imagined his regal posture would require some undoing to dissolve beneath her aching palms in ways Arcas never needed.
She’d been so blatantly, brilliantly wrong.
There was nothing soft about kissing him. This was a dive off the cliffs beside them—a plunge straight to her death, broken by icy waves that claimed the air from her lungs. Fingers clutched at his cloak, desperate to have him closer, to have him consume every thought she wished she didn’t have.
“Lu,”
he gasped as her lips untangled from his briefly, just long enough to catch any breath she could. “Lunelle.”
She shook her head, grasping his face in her cool touch, desperate to hold any piece of him he’d allow.
“Please,”
she begged, her breath hot against his neck.
“Just give me one moment of you, one single moment, and I’ll never ask you for anything else, I swear it.”
Two ceaseless pools of jade bore into her, wrestling with what a better woman might do. As his gemstone gaze searched hers, Lunelle determined there was no better woman in all thirteen courts she’d aspire to be than the one between his palms.
“Just one moment,”
she whispered again, a prayer on the sea breeze whipping beyond the cliffs.
Perhaps they could haul themselves over the jagged edges now and be rid of all of this torment. Or slip into the Rift and bang on the Nether Gate to beg sanctuary. He fought every stretch of the Tether between them as he leaned away from her, his voice hardly audible over the crashing waves below.
He brushed a tear away from the crest of Lunelle’s cheek as he spoke.
“If I give you one more moment, I fear I’ll give every damned one of them to you, Princess. Every single breath between here and my Descent would begin and end with your name. Every step I took from now until my boots crumble to dust would be in service of following you, and you alone.”
Mirquios tensed beneath her touch, as if she were truly an Ice Queen, chilling him to the bone.
“If I give you one more solitary second, Lunelle, I will insist you lay claim to any remaining moments I am allotted.”
Her heart swelled with salt and sea air, racing to keep up with the words falling from his lips.
“You will insist?”
she asked, unable to choke the bittersweet ribbon of tears slipping from her eyes.
“I will,”
he whispered.
Lunelle battled every voice that warned her to pull back her plea, to unsay the words that begged such eternal notions.
“Then insist,”
she breathed.
A fractured laugh escaped his throat, tainted by the knowledge that no amount of insistence could untangle this mess.
“I insist, Lunelle,”
he said, his arms wrapping around her waist.
“I’d insist in the face of Pluto himself.”
“Gods,”
she sighed, letting herself press against him for what would likely be the last time—had to be the last time.
“This is true hell.”
“At least we’re here together,”
he said quietly, feathering a kiss against her lips.
Lunelle rested her head against his chest, listening to the sputtering of his heart against his ribs. His chin perched atop her head, and they stood there, frozen, unable to move out of the only moment they could guarantee.
Dread poured from the back of her mind into her lungs, the face of a beloved sister filling her vision and flooding her with sickening guilt.
“We cannot be friends, Mirquios,”
she said quietly.
“No.”
He swallowed, the pulse in his throat pushing against her temple.
“We cannot be strangers,”
she whispered.
“Never.”
Her ears heated, prickling with that moment that comes before one does something truly stupid.
“My sister would never deny me this, not if she knew, Mirquois. I know her heart better than I know my own, and she would not hesitate.”
“But Arcas?—”
“Arcas is an affliction of my own doing,”
Lunelle sighed.
“If he doesn’t ally with us, he has no one. Not even the gods will care about him. I am but a political trophy to him, something to play with when he feels insecure, but to you…”
Her eyes dared to find his, her pale cheeks reddened by her near admission.
“To me… you are death herself. The only thing in life that is certain,”
the king said with a quiet reverence.
Her pulse lit up within her veins, and she wondered briefly if this was how her sister walked through the world, so positively buzzing with something in her blood that she felt as if she might burst. She’d never allowed herself the luxury of imagining an alternative, never risked the fantasy of him.
But what if?
What if?
“I will speak to my mother this evening,”
she decided, her knees aching at the firmness with which she stood on the shore.
Mirquios dropped her hand, his brows arching with confusion.
“What?”
“My mother has stood in my shoes before. Surely she would understand. If anyone could untangle this mess, she could do it.”
“Do you really think?—”
“I am not thinking at all, Mirq,”
she laughed.
That was it—that was all she’d give to his doubt. It was all she could spare. She tucked herself into him, not giving a single damn about what it would all mean.
All she could feel was the difference in his touch—the light with which he caressed her, the care. Touching him was not a distraction from what she wanted, it was destiny fulfilled.
“We need to get back,”
she spoke into his chest.
“One more moment?”
Mirquios asked, wrapping his arm around her shoulder again, staring out over the cliffs.
“One more moment,”
she murmured, lifting his hand to her lips.