CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I plastered a smirk on my face. “I just took the first step in making Solstice right. I’ve never been better.” I rolled over and slipped my hand beneath the sheets. “Now, where were we?”
I twirled beneath a domed, glass roof. Delicate fingers of glossy metal formed a latticework across the glass, twisting and twirling and interlocking like the branches of a sparse canopy. A band of intricately carved white stone supported the roof, an arched window between each of its pillars.
Vines crept along the stones and twined around the metal to hang down from the ceiling in a curtain.
A tree sat at the center, the thick roots that flowed across the floor in a river of wood and bark an extension of its gnarled trunk.
Bright-pink, deep-purple, and rich-green plants burst from the dirt floor in an explosion of color.
“It makes me think of you,” Griffon said behind me.
I tore my gaze off the tree and whipped back around.
He leaned against the doorframe, his hands in his pockets. “So wild and untouchable.”
“I don’t want to be untouchable.” A shiver traveled down my exposed spine despite the warmth that cocooned me. “Not to you.”
He pushed off the frame and stalked toward me, his eyes focused on my slightly parted lips. My breaths tumbled off them quicker and quicker with each predatory stride.
His last step brought him flush with my body, his hands spearing into my hair to grip the back of my neck. “Tell me to kiss you,” he breathed, his wine-scented breath caressing my lips. The tip of his nose brushed mine.
I met his eyes. Those pools of swirling darkness that dragged me in and pulled me under like a current. Like gravity. “Devour me.”
He crushed his lips against mine. His tongue plunged into my mouth, probing and wild, like each sweep against mine was an answer to his every desperate hope and long-forgotten prayer.
I whimpered against his mouth as something dormant flared in my chest. It was a pyre and I was helpless as I burned, every sharp breath and hungry moan stoking the flames higher and hotter.
I couldn’t pull him close enough. Couldn’t grip his wrists hard enough even as his fingers dug into my neck with bruising force.
I yanked my skirt up to my hips and forced my arms between his to weave around his neck.
He growled his approval as I slung one of my legs around his hip, his hands cupping my ass to heft me up and press me into his hard body.
I hooked my ankles a second before my back hit the tree, his hands roaming up my sides and over my breasts.
I gasped as his lips found my jaw, the hollow beneath my ear, the column of my neck.
I fisted his hair and tugged his head back, needing his lips on mine.
The spark of feral desire in his eyes sent the pyre into a godsdamned wildfire.
I claimed his mouth again. His stubble scraped my sensitive skin, his wandering hands leaving a trail of fire in their wake.
He moaned into my mouth and it almost undid me, my mind a lust-filled haze that tasted and smelled and felt like him.
He ripped his lips off mine, his panted breaths stirring my tousled hair.
He cupped my cheeks in his hands as his eyes swept over my face, a hundred emotions flitting across his unguarded expression.
“If I took Lakuro right now, I am certain it would show me you,” he breathed.
“Because I am terrified I just lost the war I’ve been fighting since you came here.
When I sat beside your bed while you screamed, so strangled by grief that you couldn’t find one happy memory to save yourself with. Since I saw you.”
I couldn’t drag my eyes off his. Couldn’t loosen my grip on his hair. “And what war have you been fighting, since then?”
His breaths punched out of his lungs, his eyes wild and vulnerable. “The one where I tried not to start falling for you.”
My breath hitched at those quiet words, full of so much fear it lanced my chest.
He shook his head, his hands rigid on my face. “But that kiss was the final battle. I surrender, Lydia. You’ve disarmed me, mind, body, and soul. And I don’t want to fight it anymore.”
Terror burrowed into every dark crevasse of my mind. He’d—he’d made me promise to kill him. To turn my fire against him until he was nothing but a pile of ash as irreparably broken as I would be when I lost him. But I couldn’t carry through with that promise. Not if—
Couldn’t because I—
“I can’t do this again,” I gasped. “I can’t let myself love you and watch you die.”
But I would. The reality that he was dying unfurled and smothered me in cold, unrelenting truth.
My feet struck the ground, and I slipped out from between his slack body and the suddenly suffocating tree at my back.
His expression shattered and his eyes—those beautiful eyes—fell to the ground. I barreled through the iron door and though halls as cold and empty and I was, that wildfire snuffed in one swift, brutal blow.
I slam into a snowdrift. Phoenixes explode skyward in a flurry of wings and indignant squawks. Agony awaits in Flesh. Even now it bashes against a heart made of stone, searching for a way in to claw and tear and shred.
“Feel it,” I grunt. “Need to feel it.” This is the final test for all those relentless hours spent practicing Lakesh. The only metric that matters after bathing in the blood of everyone I love while suffocating beneath Lakuro’s crushing weight.
I push myself up and stare at the spot Griffon and I had sat together. Bury myself in the memory of tossing plumes of fire in the air, my heart bursting with wonder. The beast battles to take over, but I refuse to let it devour the lifeline tethering me to that echo of who I am.
“You’re Lydia.” My fingers lock a death grip around the charm at my wrist. “And you owe him this.”
Flesh buried me in an avalanche of emotion, and I slammed my fist into the ground.
Something cracked. The explosion of pain jolted the memory of hurling that fist into Griffon’s face front and center.
The scowl that had taken over his features reminded me of the hundred other times I’d caught that intense and hot-as-hell look on his face.
Being back up here; the smell of him that still lingered on me; the very clothes encasing my body; everything—everything—led back to him.
“Fuck!” I yelled, the cry ripping up my throat and leaving it raw. Fire erupted out of me. The phoenixes didn’t dare come near. “Fuck!” I roared it until my lungs were empty. Until I had no breath left to give it.
I slumped to the ground and cradled my hand against my chest, every sob sending a jolt of pain up my arm. The flood of heat off my body melted the snow into a muddy slush that sucked at my bare flesh.
I eventually sat up. My shaking fingers plucked a shred of fabric out of the mud and dangled the scorched remains of my magnificent dress in front of me.
“What did I do?” I gasped. The wind tore it out of my grasp and carried it off the edge of the cliff.
A phoenix landed in front of me, its narrow beak and dainty plume marking it as female.
Her sharp gaze focused on the tears spilling down my cheeks.
She hopped closer and bowed her head just in front of mine.
When I didn’t react, she raised her gaze enough to toss me what I swear was a look of pure annoyance and hopped even closer.
Slowly, so slowly, I dipped my head until I was touching the downy feathers on her brow.
An image of me, my tears refracting moonlight in dancing rainbows against my cheeks, crashed into my mind. A resonate, questioning presence settled over me. I jerked away with a sharp inhale and gaped at her. She stared intently back.
“You want to know why I’m crying?” I swiped a finger over my cheek and stared at the plain droplet, absent the beauty her keen eyes saw in my tears. I twisted my finger toward her.
She cocked her head in answer.
“Because my heart hurts,” I whispered.
She took one, tiny hop closer to me.
“Do you know Griffon?”
She showed me an image of Griffon and I, his gaze fixated on me as I tossed them fireballs. His face—even then—was filled with wonder. Awe. My breath hitched on this perspective that I hadn’t been privy to. Here was a memory I could anchor with strongly enough to withstand any storm.
I wiped my eyes and nodded. “He told me he was falling in love with me. But…” I squeezed my eyes shut and forced out the awful words.
“He’s dying.” There were so many horrible ways to combine two little words.
They’re dead. My fault. I’m broken. But those two might have hurt the worst. “He’s dying and he’s going to leave me alone, just like they did.
The thought already hurts so much. I won’t survive it if I spend the next months letting myself fall in love with him, just to lose him.
To be the one to kill him.” I glanced back at the phoenix to find her utterly perturbed, now.
She dipped her head toward me again. I eyed her lowered brow, then warily touched my forehead to hers.
My mind turned slick as glass, tossing me from every crevasse and dislodging every foothold I had. I scrambled, but there was nowhere to grab. Nothing to cling to as a flood of her careened through my mind. A flash of terror gripped me. And then nothing.
Nothing. I just was, my consciousness suspended in darkness as the phoenix peeled apart my brain and riffled through it at her leisure.
She plucked a memory from where it slumbered in a forgotten catacomb and projected it through my mind, so real it was like I once again sat at the edge of a canal with my father.
I watched him point out ships as they sailed into and out of Docks, explaining what they were and how they worked.
My chest had been bursting with love in that moment. Now, I felt nothing as he spoke to me.
The memory faded and was replaced by Beck’s face hovering in front of me as his hands slipped up my sides and dragged my shirt up over my head.
I had been desperate for him then. Had needed the escape of his body as much as I’d needed to breathe.
But this time I went through the motions, not so much as a flicker in my core as we tasted each other for the first time.
The phoenix moved to more recent memories and I was once again at Dray’s, that knife feet from plunging into my gut. I’d been terrified. I was as empty as the vast sky as I watched the knife inch closer.
In a flash, I was on the floor, surging upright as I escaped Lakuro’s grasp. The blood that had slicked my hands was nothing. The screams I had dragged out of Griffon and Beck and my father were nothing.
I was nothing.
I snapped back into myself and jolted backward, panting on my ass as every emotion slammed back into me with as much bruising, soul-rending force as before. But that nothing. Gods, the nothing. I shivered violently.
“I understand,” I gasped. “Your methods could use some fucking work, but I get it.” She gave me a withering glare that I could only take to mean, “Well, it was effective, wasn’t it?”
I clamped my eyes shut. It would be so easy to let myself love him.
Dread still paralyzed me at the thought.
My breaths still snagged on the deep ache in my chest at the knowledge that I would love and lose him.
But the fear of feeling those things again no longer strangled me.
I would rather feel every second of my heart being ripped out of my chest than never feel anything at all.
“I get it,” I said again. “It’s worth it. But I don’t think it matters. I ruined it. I just…left him.”
She squawked and ruffled her feathers. Before I could jerk back or shove her away, she mashed her forehead back to mine. She flooded me with another deluge of memories. Her memories.
I saw a blood-soaked battlefield, where friend died to protect friend, and heroes sacrificed themselves for the good of their people.
Watched as a male killed the love of his life to save her from a horrible fate, his perfectly preserved cry of grief as he held her body so profound it still echoed through the ages.
And cried with the phoenix as her own mate tried to rescue her from the humans who had captured her long ago.
Her agony smothered me when he darted in front of an arrow meant for her, launched off a human’s bow with nothing but hate.
They watched each other as he fell back to the ground, his pristine feathers stained with a splotch of silvery blood.
She pulled back, a broken trill shattering my heart as her head dipped.
“I think I get that, too,” I said softly. “What love can and will endure is infinite.” I brushed my fingers down her soft neck. “Thank you. I am so sorry you lost your mate.” I held out my hands and pushed two massive fireballs into my palms.
She squawked and gobbled them up.
My laugh was snot-clogged and manic. I would never not find that hilarious. “Thank you,” I said again.
I scrambled through the charred fabric around me until I found a piece of that incredible skirt large enough to avoid giving the guards a show when I flew back into Falcos.
I tied it off at my breasts and wrapped it around me until all my sensitive bits were covered.
“Stone!” I commanded, and that monster burst out of me.
I sprint toward the edge of the cliff. This is a stupid godsdamned idea, but an echo of urgency still rings through my mind and I leap.
My wings fold under my weight and I plummet.
The stars are down and the ground is up and the mountains are both as I tumble through the sky.
Instincts millennia old grip me, and I drag my wings tight against my back.
I roar my defiance to the night and fling out my arms and legs to steady my wild descent.
The wind tears at my wings, but I angle sharply downward before flinging them back out.
They slice through the air, only a fraction of my weight tugging on them as I careen toward the ground.
I slowly level out and spiral down toward Falcos.
“You are Lydia,” I remind myself, my thumb brushing the phoenix charm at my wrist. “And Griffon is waiting.”