Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Iwoke up to the sound of my phone buzzing, blinking through the weak post-dawn light streaming through the windows. A muscled arm draped over my chest, and the heat of Ranth radiated across my back in the bliss of an ache I didn’t want to leave. My phone was too far away to grab without extraction.
“Ugh, sorry.” I shifted Ranth, and he rolled over, then startled to attention. “What is it?” he asked, sitting up. The sheet ribboned off him. I recalled the throaty growl he made as I traced the tattoos scrolling over his hip bones with my tongue. My heart fluttered.
“Nothing. A phone call. Hopefully, Juke.” I trailed a hand down his chest, the connection lighting us as I grabbed the phone.
It was Fabra.
I put it on speaker.
“Hey, salad girl. How’s the ash mattress working for ya? I’ll have you know the cold ground does not make for a restful slumber.”
“Playing my tiny violin, can you hear it? Why are you calling, really—did I miss the begging?”
“Rot in hell. I was calling to remind you to deliver your part of the promise. You know, we girls got nothing but our word.”
“Basically, you think kidnapping two of my friends and burning down my house gives you reason to believe I owe you any shred of honor? You lost that right when you drank my juice without asking.”
“Ouch. Don’t think this is over, bae. Fair warning and all that.”
“Thanks. That ground is going to be even colder tonight, so bundle up.” I hung up on her. She really knew how to get under my skin, but her warning had settled on me like ash. It cemented that sending Ranth back to the Garden as fast as we could was our only reasonable option to protect him.
But how could I send him back now?
“You okay?” Fingers that knew all the bumps and curves of my skin trailed down my back.
I turned, and Ranth pulled me down onto his chest. I kissed him, wishing for the world to go away.
Wishing for things I couldn’t have. His hands slid down my thighs, and I pushed him back but rubbed the hardened length of him.
“We really shouldn’t. People will be up soon, and we need to make plans.
I still can’t figure out how the Marahk know about you.
I know you think it might be Harold, but that makes no sense.
If Harold wanted you, why did he rescue us?
There’s something we don’t know, and it worries me.
You promised you’d explain the otherworld thing to me over breakfast.”
“I did, but this is pre-breakfast.” He brushed his lips over mine.
Nothing but the sheet between us, his skin was silk and muscle.
I trailed kisses down to his collar bone and buried my face in his chest, inhaling us.
My lilacs with his amber. The musk of pleasure and sweat from the right kind of exercise.
I ground my hips into his morning erection, and he moaned and flipped me onto my back, caging me between his thighs as his tongue lapped my nipple.
Memories of his cock driving into me, and the second orgasm exploding, throbbed between my legs. I wanted more of him. All of him.
“Still want that breakfast discussion?” he teased.
“Not right now.” I groaned as his teeth playfully nipped and drew his head up to capture my lips.
The tap on my door broke the mood.
“Coming,” I said, rolling off the bed. My limbs were jelly, and Ranth pulled me back for another quick kiss before I made it to the edge.
I grabbed his monster T-shirt, and he tugged the sheet from the bed, tying it around his waist effortlessly.
Ranth’s hand steadied me as I walked around him.
I tugged down the T-shirt as the door cracked open, and Ori’s head peeked in. “Hey, you’re up, good.”
“Freddie up yet?” I asked.
“Not a whimper,” Ori replied as I swung the door wide, her gaze sweeping over Ranth’s bare chest, his hand on my waist, and then the tangled bedsheets.
Our exchange of smiles was like a silent secret friend code that explained—yeah, it was really all good in ways I’d tell her later.
“Really, really sorry to bother you, but Vivian sent this, and we thought… You want to know things asap, right?”
“Yup. All good. What did Vivian find?”
“I just emailed it to you. She found a journal that explains the lack of Ahknim lore.”
I sprinted back across the room to get my phone and scrolled through the journal while Ori summarized.
“The Ahknim temple had been razed to the ground, the libraries burned, and the Keepers eviscerated about a thousand years ago. Any mention of them was to be wiped out of recorded history, which is why we hadn’t found anything.
” The email link was pages and pages long.
I wasn’t going to be able to read all this in five minutes.
“Vivian said she’d send…”
Our phones dinged one after the other. I grinned.
The email highlighted the worst of it. In ancient times, according to the medieval journal, the Ahknim were accused of killing people in blood and death rituals.
Some of the deaths were by live entombment, others by pyre, still others by drained blood and mummification. But the sacrifices had to be willing.
If this history was right, Ranth had let the order kill him.
I looked at Ranth, gutted by the realization that his life had ended when he was not much older than I was.
It made sense, but here, now, being told to me, I saw it as all new.
This information also left an enormous gaping hole to answer.
Had the Ahknim organization been kept underground all these centuries or had someone recently resurrected them?
Collectively, we needed to figure this out.
“Let’s get dressed, and we can talk over breakfast.” Ori nodded, her eyes were wide. She’d read the email too. A pestle pounded my insides. I couldn’t say it yet. Not out loud. She closed the bedroom door behind her. I sat on the edge of the bed.
“What did the message say, Sorrel?” Ranth asked, facing me.
I needed a moment to let it settle. “I—I’m not even sure how to ask, but how did you end up in the Garden? How did you—die?” I couldn’t meet his eyes.
He lifted my chin, so I had to look at him, and he was blurred by my tears as my heart ached not to hear the answer.
His voice was steady. “The Ahknim have rituals which allow the chosen to ascend. We give our lives to service and become immortal by our sacrifice.” He took my hands.
“But you’re dead? They killed you?” It came out as a whisper. My tears were strangling me, and I swiped at them.
“I asked to serve, and my role required that I leave behind my life. They kept our remains to tether the entrances.”
“Wait, so your body is what was stolen that allowed for the curse?”
“Likely, but we don’t know what happened. Ori said the temple was destroyed. These are alternate timelines. In one, the temple will still thrive, but my connection to the Garden was altered. Why does it matter to you how I died?”
“Well, because it wasn’t natural. You didn’t get old and fade after a full life.”
“I live now a life of dreams.” His thumb brushed over my bottom lip.
I rose on my toes. The kiss ignited us, burning away thought.
There was a tap on the door. “You two coming?” Ori called out.
“Be there in ten,” I called back as Ranth’s smile widened.
“Ten minutes is possible, but I’ll have to be quick,” he said, running his hands down my sides and to my butt.
I laughed at him and pushed back. “Sadly, that was for showering time. You get to go first.” I nodded at the bathroom.
Ranth’s expression melted to disappointment. He padded to the door, then looked back. “We could shower in half the time if you joined me?” he asked wolfishly.
It didn’t even take a second for my decision. “You’re so right.”
And he was, so, so right, in all the right ways.
It was closer to a half hour, but the scent of fresh yerba mate and coffee permeated the kitchen.
Over almond flour muffins and vegan cream cheese, we traded ideas, arranging the pieces of what we knew to cobble together a whacked-out plan.
We had a list of questions that needed answers.
What did a fringe group like the Marahk want with a garden of ancient trees on another world? And then there was Harold.
Ranth sat looking like the sex god I now knew he was in one of Bud’s old indigo shirts and a pair of black linen pants.
Finally, on the day I’d be sending him away, Ranth had clothes like he might wear if he lived here, clothing that looked right on him.
My goddesses, he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen.
He literally glowed. Or maybe that was my perception of him.
It didn’t matter. If I wasn’t so sore from last night’s vigorous sheet twisting that the extra shower time hadn’t helped, going back to bed and keeping him there forever sounded better than any other plan.
I polished off my muffin, hoping the plant-based energy would soothe all the muscles.
My phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my violet lace skirt, maybe one of the few pieces of clothing I owned now. I swallowed and unlocked the screen.
Gallery said it will be ready for pickup at noon. Juke texted. I stared at it like that would make the words change. It was the worst and the best news.
I held up the phone. “Hey, Juke says the gallery said ‘yes,’ and we can get it any time. When’s the next flight?” I asked Ori, hoping it was hiding my despair.
Ori opened her laptop and typed a bunch of things. “Eleven, and there’s a flight back at four. Think she can make that? I assume you are bankrolling this, Sorrel?”
“Yup.” I nodded at Bud, who raised an eyebrow over his cup of yerba mate.