TWENTY-SIX KHARVEK
TWENTY-SIX
KHARVEK
She rolls her hips with a rhythm that drives me insane, grinding down on every stroke, taking me deep enough that I feel her everywhere. I thrust up to meet her, hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise, watching her breasts bounce with each impact.
“Gods, you feel—” I can’t finish. Can barely think.
She plants her hands on my chest. Rides harder. Her head falls back, exposing the long line of her throat, and I surge up to taste it—to bite, to mark, to claim. She moans when my teeth find her pulse point, grinds down harder, takes me impossibly deeper.
I flip us again. Need to be on top. Need to control the pace before I lose my mind completely.
She lets me. Spreads her legs wider, hooks her ankles behind my back, and I sink back into her with a groan.
This angle is different—deeper somehow, hitting spots that make her gasp with every thrust. I brace myself on my forearms and set a brutal pace, driving into her like I’m trying to fuse our bodies into one.
“Yes.” Her voice is raw. Breaking. “Just like that. Don’t stop. Don’t ever—”
Her walls clench around me. Her body bows off the stone floor. And she comes again, harder than before, screaming my name loud enough to wake the dead.
The sensation undoes me. Her clenching heat, her voice, the way she looks at me like I’m the only thing in the world—it overwhelms every defense I have.
My vision whites. My body locks. I roar as I empty myself inside her, flooding her with everything I have, every barrier between us finally, completely destroyed.
I collapse against her. She wraps her arms around my back, holds me through the aftershocks, presses kisses to my sweat-slicked temple. We stay there, tangled and panting, neither able to move.
Nothing but breathing. The rasp of air. The slow return of sensation.
Then she laughs.
It’s a broken sound—exhausted, bewildered, tinged with something that might be hysteria or might be joy. I lift my head, find her looking at me with eyes that are too bright.
“That didn’t solve anything.” Her voice is hoarse. Raw.
“No.” I pull out slowly. Feel her wince at the loss. “It didn’t.”
“The hunters are still coming.”
“Yes.”
“The Matron still wants what we could produce.”
“Yes.”
“And we just—” She gestures vaguely at the chaos of torn clothes and scratched skin. “—that.”
I look at her. Really look. At the marks I’ve left on her body, the bruises blooming across her hips, the bite on her shoulder that mirrors the one she gave me. She should be horrified. Should be regretting what we’ve done.
She doesn’t look horrified. She looks… satisfied. Exhausted and battered and thoroughly claimed, but satisfied.
“Regret it?”
She considers the question with more seriousness than I expected. Takes her time answering.
“No.” The word is quiet. Certain. “Whatever else happens—I don’t regret this.”
“Even though it changes nothing?”
“Doesn’t it?” She reaches up. Touches my face—the scarred cheek, the blind eye, all the parts of me that should repulse her. “Something changed. I don’t know what yet. But something.”
She’s right. I feel it too—a shift in the foundations. We crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed. Whatever we were before this moment, we’re something else now.
I don’t have a word for it.
We dress in silence. Not awkward—just quiet. Both of us processing what happened, what it means, where it leaves us.
My arm feels different—still damaged, but stable, the rerouted channels humming with power that flows clean instead of fighting against itself.
She fixed me. Saw inside me and fixed me anyway. Then let me inside her in return.
The thought lands in my gut, heavy and unfamiliar.
“We should check on the others.” She ties her robe closed, hiding the marks I left. “They’ll be wondering—”
“They can wait.”
She looks at me. Surprised.
I cross to her. Cup her face in my hands. Kiss her forehead—gentle, so gentle it surprises us both.
“Thank you.” The words come out rough. Unused. “For fixing me. For… everything.”
Her hands cover mine. Hold them against her cheeks.
“You’re not fixed.” She keeps her voice low. “Neither am I. But we’re better.”
Better.
Maybe that’s enough. For now, maybe that’s everything.
We emerge from our corner of the ravine as dawn spreads fully across the sky.
The survivors are where Imara left them—huddled in a hollow behind a tumble of boulders, watching the ravine’s entrance with fearful eyes. Dena spots us first, her small face flooding with relief.
“You’re okay.” She scrambles up, runs to Imara, wraps thin arms around her waist. “I heard—there were sounds—”
“We’re fine.” Imara strokes the girl’s hair. “Kharvek’s arm needed treatment. It’s better now.”
Dena looks at me. At the fresh scratches visible above my collar, the marks that clearly have nothing to do with healing. Her brow furrows.
“Did the treatment hurt?”
I open my mouth. Close it. Imara saves me.
“It did. But he’s very brave.”
I’ve been called many things. Brave has never been one of them.
One of the survivors—an older man, gaunt and graying—rises from his hiding spot. “The hunters. We expected them by dawn. It’s past dawn.”
He’s right. The sun has cleared the horizon, golden light filling the ravine. I should be able to hear approaching footsteps by now, should be able to smell the hunting party on the wind. Instead—
Nothing. Silence, except for the distant call of that same bird I heard at the farmstead.
I cross to the ravine’s northern mouth. Scan the landscape. The barren earth stretches empty in every direction. No movement. No glint of weapons. No crimson flare of blood-ward magic.
“They’re not coming.”
Imara joins me, Dena still clinging to her hand. “What?”
“The hunters.” I point toward the eastern horizon, where the blood-ward glow was strongest last night. “They should be here by now. They locked onto our position. They knew exactly where we were.”
“Then where—”
A flash in the distance. Not red—silver. A signal mirror, catching the dawn light. Three pulses. Pause. Three more.
I know that sequence. Every resistance cell Imara built uses it.
“Tomek.” Imara’s breath catches. “That’s Tomek’s diversion signal. He’s—” She grabs my uninjured arm. “The hunters went the wrong way. He led them off.”
Tomek—the man who maintains the Sanctum’s drainage systems, who provided us entry routes before the pit. He should be dead or compromised by now. Instead, he’s out there, somewhere, drawing pursuit away from us.
“How?”
“He must have created a false trail. Made it look like we went east instead of north.” Her grip tightens. “He’s buying us time. We have a window.”
A window. The first real opportunity we’ve had since the pit.
“How long?”
“Hours, maybe. The hunters will figure out they’ve been deceived. They’ll double back. But for now—” She turns to face me, and I see the calculation in her gaze, the strategist’s mind working through possibilities. “We have time to stop running and start planning.”
Time. Such a strange gift, after days of flight.
I look at my arm. At the bandages that need replacing, the channels that Imara stabilized through pain and magic and the kind of intimacy I never expected to survive.
Then I look at her—at this woman who’s seen inside me and chosen to stay, who’s fought with me and beneath me and refused to be treated as anything less than an equal.
“What’s the plan?”
Her mouth curves. Not quite a smile—something harder. “First, we get the survivors to safety. There are contacts beyond the Vale who can take them, get them started on new lives. Then—”
“Then we go back.”
She nods. “The Matron expects us to run. Expects us to hide. The last thing she expects is for us to walk back into her Sanctum and burn it to the ground.”
The idea is insane. Suicidal. Exactly the kind of plan I’d come up with if I were planning alone.
But I’m not planning alone. Not anymore.
“The others.” I gesture toward the survivors. “They can’t come with us.”
“No. That’s why we get them out first.” She turns toward Dena, crouches to meet the girl’s eyes. “Dena. You’re going to go with these people to a safe place. Somewhere the clan can’t find you.”
Dena’s face crumples. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I know.” Imara cups her cheek. “But what Kharvek and I have to do next—it’s dangerous. Too dangerous for you.”
“You’re going to fight the bad woman. The one whose voice came through the sky.”
“Yes.”
“What if you die?”
The question hangs in the morning air. I watch Imara struggle with the answer—how do you explain to a child that some things are worth dying for?
“If we die”—she pauses, choosing her words—“it will be because we chose to fight instead of hiding. And maybe our fight will make things better for people like you. Maybe it will shatter what needs to be broken.” She pulls Dena into an embrace.
“Either way, I need you to live. Can you do that for me?”
Dena nods against her shoulder. Small. Scared. Braver than anyone should have to be at nine years old.
Imara releases her, stands. Meets my gaze.
“We move out in an hour. I need to contact what’s left of my network, arrange passage for the survivors.” She pauses. “And you need to rest. The healing helped, but your body is still recovering.”
Rest. Another word that doesn’t fit in my vocabulary.
But she’s right. The healing took more out of me than I want to admit, and the aftermath took more still. If we’re going back to the Sanctum, if we’re going to face the Matron and everything she can throw at us, I need to be at full strength.
“One hour.” I move back toward our corner of the ravine. “Then we plan.”
“Then we plan,” she agrees.
I pause. Look back at her—at the marks visible on her neck, the disheveled hair, the fierce determination burning in her gaze.
“Imara.”
“What?”
I don’t have words for what I want to say.
No vocabulary for gratitude, for affection, for the strange new ache that’s taken root in my chest. So I cross back to her.
Take her face between my palms. Kiss her slowly, thoroughly, right there in front of Dena and the survivors and anyone else who might be watching.
When I pull back, her cheeks are flushed. Her breath comes quick.
“What was that for?”
“Because I wanted to.”
Simple. True. The first time I’ve ever done something purely because I wanted to, without calculation or purpose.
Her smile is the brightest thing I’ve seen since we fled the Sanctum.
“Get some rest.” Her hand lingers on my arm. “We have a clan to destroy.”
I nod. Turn. Head back toward the shadows where we first gave in to this thing between us.
Behind me, I hear Imara start giving orders—calm, competent, already planning the next move. Ahead of me, the ravine walls cast long shadows that feel more like shelter than threat.
Something has shifted. Something that can’t be undone.
I don’t know what it means. Don’t know where it leads.
But I want to find out.