Chapter 29 Esme
ESME
He lowers me to float again, arms looped under my back so my spine is cradled by water and stone.
The shift seats him fractionally deeper, drawing a gasp from me as my arms tighten around his neck.
He still holds me suspended, trembling with the effort of remaining motionless, as if the single inch he’s gained already threatens the thin hold we have here.
We breathe together in that aching pause—inhale, hold, release—until the space between pulses disappears entirely. He folds down to kiss me, slow licks and softer bites, tongue stroking each word he won’t say aloud: Stay. Feel. Mine. Yours. Now.
Minutes slide by—three, five, who knows?
Time feels broken now. The cave’s glow turns molten where it touches our skin; steam kisses sweat from our collarbones, creating new rivers that never reach the water below.
I lose track of whose shivers begin where, of the space between us, of how long his body has been held so close to mine.
Then the cave shudders around us, lights flickering, stone trembling, as though the spell has remembered its duty.
Dayn’s arms loosen around me, unhooking from my back as though they were never meant to stay.
I feel the exact instant our bodies separate—an ache that isn’t pain but a hollow carved into my spine.
One heartbeat I am wrapped around him, still inside the endless hush of our joined bodies, and the next I am sliding free.
The water folds between us like a curtain, suddenly cold where his skin isn’t touching.
He steadies me on the ledge, palms steady but retreating.
“Time’s run out,” he murmurs, voice pitched low, almost apologetic.
I rise shakily to my feet and for a second all I can do is stand there, naked and streaming, lungs shuddering in and out. As he climbs out of the pool too, the turquoise light paints rivers along his collarbones, steam drifting off them like ghosts leaving.
I feel hollow—no pain, no triumph, no plan—just a raw, scraped-out space beneath my ribs. My skin hums, every nerve ending stunned. The ring on my finger pulses once, twice, then steadies into quiet warmth.
He doesn’t speak either. His eyes are too steady, wide pupils ringed with damp amber. I see something in them I refuse to recognize as worry. We stare at each other across four arm-lengths of space, both breathing like we’ve surfaced from drowning.
His gaze tracks the full length of my body, follows it, as though he wants to commit every detail to memory, then lifts back to my face.
His lips part, close. No vow. No taunt. No tease.
Just the raw fact of us: two killers turned gentle, both undone by the same hour.
I want to wrap my arms across my chest—the old reflex of armor—but the motion feels pointless.
He has already seen everything, down to the pulse that still stutters behind my jaw.
I finally push out a breath that tastes of him and saltwater. “What happens when the sand starts again?”
The question scrapes, too small for what I really mean: what happens to what we just became?
He tips his head, droplets hanging from his lashes.
“Whatever you decide,” he says, voice hoarse but level. “Nothing more.”
It should comfort me. It does the opposite: I feel the moment slipping, edges curling in like burning paper. He stands still, letting me look, letting me remember. I rub the ring against my thumb, which feels like the one small anchor left.
“One hour,” I whisper. “Not enough.”
“More than we had yesterday,” he answers, so quietly the water swallows half the words.
I nod once, eyelids burning. I draw the smallest possible breath and straighten my back.
“But Esme,” he says, his tone shifting, turning graver.
“Remember what I told you. This is still the trial. A construct. And while I’ve been able to bend it—just enough, and only for a while—it is still a game I did not create and you willingly entered, thus bound to a framework I did not design. Yet, I also willingly entered it.”
For the first time I can remember, his eyes look…
genuinely remorseful. My heartbeat quickens as he steps away from me, the space between us cooling further while he reaches for his clothes.
“So, I cannot change what comes next,” he concludes.
“Just try to remember that, in the real world, you have a choice… Try to remember that when this ends.”
Reality warps around me. One minute I'm standing in Dayn's intimate, luminescent cave, and the next, I'm fully clothed again, standing on a vast, barren plateau that stretches to a horizon ringed with jagged mountains.
Sharp-edged obsidian stretches beneath my boots and above me is a sky the color of infected blood.
Strange pillars of black glass rise from the ground.
The air here is thin and metallic, each breath scraping my lungs raw.
The grotto is already gone. Dayn is gone.
The taste of him is still on my tongue when the air hardens into the reek of iron and something burning.
I spin, heart clawing my ribs.
And he’s here.
Ten paces away, barefoot on broken obsidian, wearing the same black fatigues he peeled off in the cave. But his eyes are wrong—amber drained to sulfur yellow, pupils slitted wide like a hawk scenting prey.
He smiles, and it’s the smile from an actual construct, empty, hungry. Yet the voice that rolls out is Dayn’s—raw, familiar, unbearable.
“Hour’s up, little witch. Time to graduate.”
The ground trembles. Out of the cracked stone rise blades—hundreds of them—each one a mirror of the sword I dropped back in the ruined city. They hem us in, creating an arena boundary.
I understand with the clarity of a guillotine: the trial never left. It only lulled on borrowed time, paused in a flaw Dayn forced open. Now we’re spat right back into the fire.
Blythe’s preparatory explanation echoes in my mind: “An Ide is lured when the soul is driven to its breaking point, for only the strongest can summon an Ide. You have it in you, Esme. Just remember: mercy will hold you back. There is no room for it in war, and none in an Ide trial.”
I taste bile in my throat as Dayn—no, the thing wearing him—tilts his head.
Strange runes around his throat brighten, and I suddenly feel the bond between us flaring so violently my knees buckle.
Power floods in, but it’s not the intoxicating kind he’s fed me before; it’s like molten metal, scouring every vein.
I clamp my teeth tight to keep from gasping.
He starts walking. Each step drives another scalding wave through me, as if the ground were pumping his life directly into me—too much, too fast. My vision tunnels. I draw my shadows instinctively, but they shred the moment they materialize, as if his own power drinks them.
Ten paces shrink to five. He doesn’t bother with weapons; he is the weapon. Dark claws flick out even in his human form, scales rippling up his arms in obsidian-gold patches. The construct’s smile never wavers.
He halts an arm’s length away. Heat ripples off him as he raises one clawed hand and traces my cheek with the back of a knuckle, tenderness and menace braided so tight I can’t tell which is real.
“I gave you an hour,” he whispers. “Now pay the toll.”
His power convulses again. Inside my chest something feels like it’s tearing—fabric of soul, not flesh.
I feel the rip travel downward, splitting memory from identity.
The cave, the grotto, the way he said my name like it was sacred—all of it is scraped out, pinned against this new reality for inspection.
He leans close, mouth at my ear. “Kill me, or I’ll unmake you piece by piece. You know I can.”
Yes. I know. I feel the first piece tear free—my mother’s face dissolving into static.
Another follows—Brynn’s laugh scattering into shards of glass.
They hover around us like embers before winking out.
The trial feeds on them, forging its fuel from everything I love, fused now with the violent voltage of dragon power.
I bite down on the scream clawing up my throat and force my feet to move. He stalks; I circle.
“Stop,” I rasp, but I don’t know which Dayn I’m talking to—the one who asked for my choice or the one who will peel it from me molecule by molecule. “Please.”
A flicker stutters behind his eyes, a warm gold pulse under the sharpness. It’s small, a candle shuttered in a storm, but I see it. I feel it. Our bond thrums a counter-beat, the memory of hot mineral water, his mouth on every part of me, the word here.
The construct smiles wider, crueler, and the bond squeezes as if clenched by a fist. Pain detonates behind my eyes. The ground tilts and the blades circling us seem to hum, urging me to grab one, use it, end this.
“Make your move, Salem,” he says, close to mocking. “Or your brother will be next.”
The trial wants rage. It wants me feral, mindless. And gods, it’s easy to give it. My shadows strain, shiver—then wither under the furnace of him. I swallow hard, force my focus smaller, to the ring tight on my finger and the heat it’s still holding like a secret.
I step in instead of out.
He tilts his head, amused—then I’m against his chest, palms flat, breath mixing.
He’s so much taller; I have to reach high to catch his mouth.
I kiss him. Not soft—devouring, desperate, the kind of kiss that tries to barter time.
His breath rushes in like he didn’t expect me to close distance.
His hands tighten at my waist, claws pricking cloth, a warning disguised as a caress.
“I remember,” I whisper against his lips, voice shredded. “I remember the water. I remember you asking.” The yellow in his gaze sharpens, but beneath it a thin seam of gold glows, seeming to flicker like a candle.
The blades surrounding us sing in the windless air. But I don’t reach for one, I reach inside.
His power rips through me like a live wire, searing every nerve ending raw.
The pain is exquisite, unbearable—but beneath the inferno, I feel something else: a gossamer thread, delicate as spider silk yet unmistakably there, woven from the mineral-rich steam of the cave, from the heat of his breath branding my neck, from the bruising grip of his hands as they'd pinned mine exactly where he wanted.
I mentally seize this filament with desperate hands.
It sizzles against my consciousness, scorching my very essence, exactly as I knew it would.
This connection transcends flesh—it is him, distilled to his purest form; it is me, stripped of pretense; it is the stolen hour we carved from chaos and the inconceivable choice he entrusted to me alone.
“I’m sorry,” I say into his mouth, and taste iron, and salt, and steam. “I’m going to use you.”
“Always do,” the construct purrs, and the gold flickers harder, like a pulse. For an instant I swear I hear him, the real him, under the cruel smile.
Do it.
I move.
My left hand stays on his face, fingers in his hair, holding him exactly where I need him—nose to nose, breath to breath. My right drops and opens. I don’t call the blades. I don’t call the shadows. I lay my palm over his heart.
Skin to furnace. Ring to ring. The power surging in me screams.
Rather than try to shape it, I let the filament I found in the water—thin, fragile, gold—run straight through my hand into him and back again, a circuit closed by mouth and breath and the last of my sanity.
The construct’s smile cuts me, but under it I feel the flicker of him, the way he leans the smallest fraction into my touch like he did in the grotto, as if bowing his throat to a knife he’s chosen.
“Eyes on me,” I whisper, stealing his own command, and when his pupils flare I move.
I turn the conduit inward.
Seizing the wildfire roaring through me—the thing that has been flaying me—I hook my fingers in it, and wrench. Inward. I pour him back into himself.
His power punches into his chest under my palm like a star imploding.
Heat climbs my arm, blistering, and the ring on my finger goes white-hot, the air around us cracking with the smell of burning pine and coin.
The construct snarls, tries to rip free, but my left hand fists in his hair and drags him into the kiss like a benediction, like a binding.
Now he tastes of iron and jasmine steam and something that breaks me.
For a heartbeat, the yellow in his eyes fractures. Gold rises—not hungry, not cruel—just Dayn. The one who waited. The one who said one hour and meant it.
The gold under the yellow in his eyes floods wide, just for a breath. And then his weight disappears from my hands, his body breaking apart into burning ash at my feet.