Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Being back in Cade’s room made Bridget’s head spin. When she closed her eyes, it almost didn’t feel like five months had gone by… that it was just yesterday she’d been sick in his bed or standing by the fireplace contemplating how to get back to the human realm. Back to the life she had wanted.
Now, she wasn’t so sure what she wanted her future to be.
Nylah was safe and currently being tucked away in a secured room until morning. That was enough for now. In the morning, Stellan would have more answers for them… about Tuathan artifacts and those creatures. In the morning, it would be clearer what she was supposed to do.
When the heat radiating from the fireplace finally calmed her racing heart, she explored the tiny bits of newness scattered throughout Cade’s room.
New books were stacked on the table by his large bed.
By the bathroom, a hole indented the dark blue wall, along with a cracked vase in the corner.
Frowning, she wondered what had happened.
Absentmindedly, she flipped through the loose papers on his desk.
There was a map of the continent and a few sketches.
Some even of her. In one of them, she was wearing an outfit she didn’t recognize.
A dark blue gown with a wide neckline and puffy sleeves.
The door squeaked open behind her. Bridget whirled around and stuffed the sketch underneath the others. Something about it raised goosebumps on her skin.
“Nylah is in the room across the hall with Delphine,” Cade said, throwing his jacket on the edge of his bed.
His white shirt underneath, covered in dirt and blood, was hanging on by a button.
“She took the potion Echnav made for her, but not before she told me all about the carjacker you knocked to the ground in Boston. I definitely need to hear that story from your perspective, by the way.” Cade slipped his shirt over his head.
He used it to wipe some dirt off his face before he threw it to the corner of the room.
“Since everyone is focused on what happened at the wall, no one saw us enter the palace. My father should be clueless until the morning.”
“And Finn is with Alexia?” Bridget asked, trying not to stare too much at his exposed chest. Her fingers itched to touch him, especially when he came to stand less than an inch from her. Too close when the weight of five months still hung between them.
Cade nodded. “He’ll stay outside her room until morning. I don’t know why you don’t want her back in the dungeon after what she did.”
“She’s trying to save her family… I guess I can relate.”
Closing her eyes, Bridget leaned into Cade’s touch when his thumb began to trace her cheekbone.
The rest of his fingers tangled in her messy hair, loose from the tiny braid she’d tried to secure it in before crossing the gate.
Heat traveled all the way to her toes, so simultaneously comforting and awakening that she almost swayed on her feet.
“What really happened out there in the woods?” Cade asked. “Why were you so affected by what Quinn said?”
Bridget searched his earnest gaze. Something inside her unlocked and the pressure to keep just how many dreams and visions she’d been having a secret deflated. “I’ve been hearing things,” she admitted. “And seeing things.”
“Like what?”
Despite the openness and belief in his voice, Bridget couldn’t help but wryly crack, “Archer thinks it’s magical induced trauma… That my brain has been permanently affected by too much magic and that it’s causing me to imagine things.”
Like Quinn.
She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
Anger flickered over Cade’s features. He gently grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. “Archer has never lived through breaking a curse and been told he had a past life five hundred years ago.”
Bridget let out a broken laugh. Leaning against his chest, she reveled in the safety of his arms. Just for a moment. Moving his right hand to her temple, Bridget said, “Try and look. That might be easier than explaining.”
A quick pinch sliced across her forehead, then Cade was skipping through her memories.
To make it easier, she tried to bring the dreams to the forefront of her mind.
The ballroom. Vega stabbing her mysterious companion.
The image of that same girl in the woods, taunting her by the gate.
When a trickle of blood escaped Bridget’s nose, Cade dropped his hand.
The sudden departure of his presence left her head throbbing.
“And nothing ever changes?” Cade asked, grabbing her waist to keep her now trembling body steady. “It’s the same room and girl, over and over?”
“Do you recognize her?”
“I don’t… She said she was just like you. Maybe you knew her before…”
Before. In the life neither of them could remember. Unable to scrub the image of dripping metal claws from her mind, Bridget swallowed her fear. “You don’t think it’s her, do you?”
The idea that Vega had been messing with her mind from Iegorus had slowly been driving her crazy.
Cade was silent for a long moment. “I didn’t feel anyone else,” he said, brushing her hair out of her face. “But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t tried. If it happens again, I’ll be here.”
Unable to speak from the knot in her throat, Bridget nodded. She wanted to correct him. To say when it happened again. Because it would. The idea she would be back in the ballroom the moment she closed her eyes, even next to Cade, made her stomach twist.
Pushing it from her mind, Bridget picked up the backpack she’d brought with her and zipped it open. “I didn’t take much with me when I left… Part of me wasn’t sure we would even make it here. But this notebook goes into more detail. I wrote down every dream in it.”
Bridget handed it to him and silently watched him thumb through a few of the pages. After a moment, he put it down on his desk.
“What did Echnav say?”
There was a strange tone in his voice, like the question was forced out of his mouth.
Bridget titled her head. “I didn’t tell him.
I don’t know why.” Or maybe she did. The thought of having another person look at her like she was crazy, especially him, had kept her mouth shut. “His real name is Stellan, actually.”
“Right. He did tell me that in a not so polite way in between fireball lessons at the wall.”
Staring at the small grin blossoming on his face, the reality of where she was came crashing down on her.
She was in Elyria. With Cade. Reaching up to trace the bags under his eyes, so similar to her own, emotion barreled up her spine.
His hair was longer than she’d ever seen it and there was a new scar above his eyebrow.
Dirt and smoke stained his face, evidence of what they’d just fought and lived through.
Astraeus had been close to being overcome.
So why was there so much joy stirring in her gut?
“What’s wrong?”
Bridget didn’t realize she’d started crying until Cade’s fingertips wiped away drops of hot liquid running down her cheeks.
“I’ve spent months beating myself up for missing you and wanting to be here,” she croaked.
“And when I found out about everything… about you and us and why Cora came after me in the first place, I was so relieved. It suddenly made sense why I always felt so out of place and couldn’t stop obsessing about what was going on here even after I was back with Nylah. But now that I’m here… did we do this?”
She gazed at the window. Though she couldn’t see anything but a dark night sky, she knew chaos still plagued the city. That workers and soldiers were fortifying the wall and sorting through the debris.
“Are we the reason for those creatures? Did we bring an entire war to the future just so we could try to be together?”
“Bridget…”
He didn’t have to finish his sentence for her to understand it was more than that.
They’d needed more time to defeat Vega, according to Stellan.
And resurrecting them in the future had ensured that.
But she couldn’t ignore a stirring in her gut that there was more to it.
That even back then, she hadn’t been able to let him go.
Bridget let out a strangled laugh. “What does it say about me that I’m happy about it? ”
Cade grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. “Hey, I’m happy too. I’ve felt like a ghost these past few months. It was like my heart had completely stopped beating until I saw you come out of that forest.”
Bridget’s heart throbbed. “I know how you feel,” she whispered.
She’d barely felt alive since she’d woken up from her coma.
But the knowledge about the past she’d learned from Stellan came crashing down on her.
“What if me being here is wrong? Stellan tried to stop me from coming. He hid the gate from me. He only helped get us here because Nylah is sick and Marin needed help.”
He told me if I came back, people would suffer.
The sentence wouldn’t leave her throat. It couldn’t. Not when the emotion swimming in Cade’s eyes was tearing her to pieces.
“You being here could never be wrong,” Cade argued. He grabbed her hand and placed it on the center of his chest. His heartbeat pounded under palm. “This isn’t wrong. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
“I love you, too,” Bridget choked. The room blurred as she placed a bruising kiss on his lips. She poured every ounce of longing she’d felt for him since she’d left and hoped it said everything she couldn’t.
She wanted to scream in protest when he broke the kiss.
Cade’s labored breaths on her heated skin silenced her as he kept his lips a hairsbreadth away from her own.
He looked almost as wrecked as she felt when he said, “I don’t care if fate or a curse brought us together.
I would still choose you. In every life.
Every time. I don’t need history to tell me that. ”
Bridget wasn’t sure who moved first, but his kiss consumed her again.
His tongue slid against hers, igniting a hunger that roared through her chest like wildfire.
Every nerve lit up at once. Her hands roamed over the warm, solid lines of his back, nails scraping lightly along his skin.
When his mouth found the hollow of her throat, a moan escaped her lips, unbidden and raw.
His lips scorched a path from her jaw to her collarbone, each kiss like a brand against her skin.
Bridget tangled her hands in Cade’s wild hair. Breathless, she shoved off her jacket, and he helped her tug free of the green sweater clinging to her damp skin. His hands slipped to her waist, trailing over bare skin. Possessive and reverent all at once.
Cade froze when his fingers brushed against the new scar stretching from the bottom of her rib cage to her breast. His fingers brushed against the jagged skin where a bullet had ripped her open.
Bridget stilled. Her heart climbed into her throat. For a beat, she thought about reaching for her shirt. About telling him not to look. But he was already lowering to his knees.
Softly, Cade pressed his lips to the edge of the scar.
Then again. Slower. Firmer. His mouth trailed down the twisted seam.
She watched him, body trembling, as his fingers skimmed over her ribs with aching tenderness.
Heat surged to Bridget’s core as she reached for him.
Her fingers curled into the front of his torn shirt, tugging until he looked up at her again.
The moment their eyes locked, electricity pulsed through her veins.
She didn’t want gentleness right now. She wanted him. Like she always would. And not because they were finally safe, but because nothing about their world ever was.
When he started to rise, she met him halfway, capturing his mouth with hers in a kiss that was deeper.
Fiercer. Her nails scraped across his shoulders, pulling him closer, until their bodies pressed flush together.
Cade groaned low in his throat, hands gripping her waist like he might come undone if he let go.
Bridget spun them, backing him toward the bed until the backs of his legs hit the edge.
He sat with a thud, but didn’t stop touching her.
His hands roamed her back and her hips. She climbed into his lap and kissed him again, teeth grazing his bottom lip before his hands slid into her hair and he deepened the kiss until the world tilted.
She wasn’t sure when his shirt came off, only that her palms couldn’t stop tracing the hard lines of his chest. His muscles flexed and twitched beneath her touch. Her breath caught when he shivered.
Cade’s mouth brushed her shoulder, then lower.
Bridget barely registered when he lifted her, gently laying her back against the cool sheets, his body hovering over hers.
His fingers trembled slightly as they skimmed the edge of her ribs and the curve of her waist, like he was memorizing every piece of her.
The heat of his hands ignited something low in her belly. She arched into his touch, dizzy with the sensation of being completely unraveled. Cade kissed her again, this time slow and aching. And then, with one final breath, he entered her.
A rush of fire bloomed in her chest, stealing the air from her lungs. Flames licked through her veins, melting her into him until she wasn’t sure where she ended and he began.
And then when all that remained was heat and breath, she let the fire consume her completely.