Chapter Two #2
True to her word, as dusk fell around them, Thea begrudgingly allowed them to stop, handing her flask of ale over to her eager friend.
Exhaustion settling deep into her bones, she made her way through the dense forest, searching for a suitable spot to set up camp and finding an alcove that offered a small reprieve from the biting wind.
While the others gathered kindling and wood, Thea tried to create a level surface for their tents, her fingers aching in the cold.
She knew it would make more sense to share a tent with her friends given the freezing temperatures, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to do it.
The last tent she’d shared had been with him after the battle of Notos.
‘I need you,’ she had whispered.
‘You have me. Every part of me belongs to you…’
Lies. So many lies. And she’d believed them all. Was he laughing at her out there? At how easily he’d gotten under her skin? At the apprentice he’d fucked and thrown to the wolves?
‘Should have stayed in the village,’ Cal moaned as he returned and began preparing the fire, holding his blue-tinged fingers over the weak flames and blowing air into the kindling.
‘Blame Thea,’ Kipp said, cheerfully taking a swig from his flask after tending to the horses.
‘Oh, I do,’ Cal replied, holding his hand out for the ale.
Thea watched her friends quietly as she finished setting up her tent, wishing she could find that sense of ease once more.
But her mind was troubled by thoughts of the fallen Warsword, of fate stones and daughters of darkness, of a tearing Veil and a world on the brink of destruction.
And so she ate her rations in silence and retired to her tent, leaving Cal and Kipp to their ale and bickering.
‘Wake me when it’s my turn for sentry,’ she said, closing the flap behind her and lighting a small lantern.
With more vigour than she intended, she unbuckled and unlaced the outer layers of her armour, hating that he’d been the one to give it to her.
Every time she put it on, she was plagued with the memory of him kneeling before her, his touch skimming across her body as he strapped her into it.
A small part of her had considered getting rid of the set for that reason alone, but it was too fine a make, too good a fit, and she’d never find a decent replacement on the road.
So every day, she wore it with resentment, and every time it saved her from bodily harm, she cursed Wilder Hawthorne anew.
Even after she had removed the most cumbersome parts of her armour, Thea feared sleep wouldn’t come easily.
It rarely did these days. She busied herself with Audra’s meditation cards, reading over the mental exercises her former warden expected her to do while she hunted down a traitor.
Thea nearly laughed at that. It was exactly the sort of thing Audra would expect.
She was a hard-arse, if there ever was one.
She shuffled the cards. Each was the size of her palm, the corners bent, the surfaces smudged with grime and soot, the ink bleeding on some of the ones she’d dropped in the snow. It hardly mattered. She knew most of them by heart now.
Thea closed her eyes and tipped her face towards the ceiling of her tent, taking a deep breath.
Strong of mind, strong of body, strong of heart, she told herself.
She didn’t know why, out of all thirty cards, that one had resonated with her the most. But when those words were echoing in her head, she somehow felt less broken, as though there were some small hope in the world that she might put the pieces of herself back together.
It was a brief reprieve from the hollowness inside, where the kernel of her power had once bloomed.
In the privacy of her tent, she sought it out again, night after night, to no avail. She combed through the lessons she’d had with Audra and Wren.
‘What does your lightning and thunder tell you?’ Wren had asked in Notos.
‘I am the storm…’ Thea muttered now. But with every utterance of those words, that empty space ate away at her, a constant nagging sensation from the deepest part of her soul.
With a quiet curse, Thea stuffed the cards back in her cloak pocket, her fingers brushing against the other item she couldn’t seem to leave alone. The sapphire she’d taken from Hawthorne’s effects before she’d left Notos.
The brilliant blue gem gleamed in her palm. Of all the things for her to take, she found no rhyme or reason to another woman’s jewel making it into her possession.
Adrienne . Not that Thea cared, but that had been the name of the lover before her. Apparently, they shared the same bad taste in fallen Warswords. Thea sent her silent commiserations.
With her fingers growing more numb by the second, the cold drove her to her bedroll and blankets. The air was so chilled that the additional layers didn’t do much to ease her shivering. But Thea curled up on her side anyway, clutching her fate stone to her chest.
‘Remember me.’
The words of the seer came back to her. But Thea could only recall the words alone, nothing of who had whispered them to her in the dark as the piece of jade had been pressed into her palm.
She had tested the fates time and time again. She had tossed the cursed stone into the sea, only for it to find her once more.
‘Fate always finds its way,’ she muttered to herself bitterly, and prayed to the Furies that sleep found her first.
Gentle fingers grazed her neck, leaving a trail of fire in their wake, followed by a whisper of cold, a pulse of longing in their absence.
Naked, Thea arched her back, seeking that intoxicating touch.
And she found it as hot lips closed over her nipple, teasing it into a hard point while firm, calloused hands closed around her thighs, spreading them wide.
A familiar weight pressed against her and she moaned in relief.
It had been so long. Her whole body was ablaze, every nerve ending alive and ready to be utterly frayed with pleasure.
But the pressure of another body was fleeting, and Thea writhed as mouth and tongue moved to her other nipple, teeth scraping gently, causing her to buck in frustration, in demand.
She raised her hips, seeking the friction she so desperately wanted between her legs, her core aching with need.
A deep chuckle vibrated against her heated skin, only driving her closer to the brink of insanity. She needed to be filled, needed to feel every inch of him.
But she wasn’t met with the powerful thrust she craved. Hands holding her open all the while, the mouth on her trailed down, in a long, tortuous lick, to the juncture of her thigh and hip, then blew cool air on the most intimate part of her, teasing her, leaving her wet and wanting.
Thea held her breath, waiting for the touch she knew would send her hurtling towards bliss-soaked madness, into oblivion.
At last, his thumb dragged through the slickness at her core before circling her clit, eliciting a shameless moan from her. She was molten with desire, with the feverish need for him —
Thea cried out, her fingers spearing through his soft hair as his mouth closed over her. Her body answered to every stroke of his tongue as he flattened it and licked her from bottom to top, again and again, before sucking on her clit.
Heat swelled between her thighs, tingling and unbearable in the most addictive way. That coil of longing wound tighter and tighter, and she gasped as he slid a thick finger inside her, his tongue still working her.
Arching her hips towards the building pressure, Thea moaned again through the haze of lust as a second finger joined the first, hitting a spot deep inside her as he lavished her.
Her climax hit in a blinding wave of white, barrelling through her like an unyielding storm. As she shuddered through the final spirals, she opened her eyes to see broad, sculpted shoulders and a muscular back… Whorls of black ink covering golden skin and ancient words tattooed down his spine.
Glory in death, immortality in legend.
She knew then that she was dreaming. But beneath the warmth of him, she didn’t want to wake up. Not yet. She dreamt of the man Wilder Hawthorne had once been to her, his powerful presence, his deep, melodic voice whispering secrets to her in the night.
‘This thing between us is endless. Nothing will stop me loving you.’
She dreamt of his fingers, his tongue and his cock, of all the wicked ways he could use them.
She dreamt of his strong arms guiding her own, the weight of twin swords in her hands as they trained for dual wielding.
His gentle touch, soaping her hair as he washed it when it pained her to do so.
His laugh, rich and deep, when he finally allowed himself to relax…
‘Because I fucking love you .’
The words careened into her, and the weight of his body fell upon her own, crushing her to him, his lips finding hers, whispering her name against her skin.
Thea lurched awake with a gasp, the air clouding before her face, her palm pressed to the hammering in her chest. The dreams had been so visceral that she swore she could smell him, traces of rosewood and leather lingering in the tent.
For a moment, she breathed in the scent wrapping around her, that deliciously masculine essence she had once known so well.
She swallowed hard, trying to force her heart rate back to normal as the memory of the fallen Warsword faded.
But the scent of him did not abate.
And as she scanned the tent, she saw why.
At the entrance was a small box wrapped in brown paper, a lightning bolt drawn across its surface.
Hawthorne . He’d been here.
With a scream of fury, Thea snatched it up and burst from her tent, startling Cal, who was still sitting at the fire.
‘Where is he?’ she shouted. ‘How did he get in my tent?’
Cal blinked at her. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Hawthorne! Hawthorne was here!’ She waved the small box at him, looking around the campsite wildly. ‘Where the fuck is Kipp?’
‘On watch…’ Cal looked at her as though she were going mad. ‘Thea… I think you must have been having a nightmare.’
‘Then what the fuck is this?’ she exclaimed, shoving the box into his chest, noting that not only was there a lightning bolt sketched across it, but three little words as well:
Happy name day.
A taunt.
Rage roiled within Thea, her heart racing once again, beating almost painfully against her ribcage as short, shallow gasps took hold. Her whole body tensed, her fists clenching at her sides.
For a year she had hunted him, had chased him all over the midrealms, had slayed every monster in her path, save for him.
Now, here he was, proving that she was as incompetent as the whispers said.
He had snuck past Kipp on watch, past Cal at the fire and into her tent to leave this barb at her feet.
She hadn’t even woken until it was too late. Some would-be Warsword she was.
Cal was turning the object over in his fingers with a frown, and Thea snatched it back to examine it herself.
Happy name day.
For the briefest of seconds, her pathetic heart wondered if it was a true gift, rather than an insult. But it was beyond unfathomable.
With an enraged cry, she threw the box with all her strength into the dark, icy forest, towards the half-frozen river.
‘I’m going to kill him.’