Chapter Thirty-Four
Solana didn’t have time to consider rifting before Reyes was on top of her, the weight of him fully unleashed, knocking the breath from her lungs.
The impact rattled her teeth. She tasted blood, but she couldn’t swallow because Reyes’s hands were wrapped around her neck, his eyes bulging in his head, the veins in his temples throbbing.
He was fighting himself as he fought her.
Solana pried at his fingers. She scratched her own skin trying to free herself from his unyielding grip.
There wasn’t enough space in her mind to separate herself from what was happening and rift.
Her dagger had been knocked from her hand, and she didn’t dare call it.
It was as if his eyes were begging her to end him.
All the muki she had killed with the same look splayed across their terrifying faces flashed across her mind.
All the times she felt their relief, their gratefulness at the end.
Reyes wanted that from her, and yet she was a coward.
She sobbed beneath his hands, and she flailed underneath his body, desperately trying to dislodge him, to no avail.
He was an immovable force and she was tempted to surrender to her fate.
Finally, she found the strength to call her dagger. Its hilt hit her palm with a thud and she swung it into Reyes’s leg, far from any soft parts that would kill him. He roared with pain, his hands loosening just enough for her to roll out from his grasp and scramble to her knees.
A quick glance around the room told her Killian was nowhere to be seen.
She would rift to him. She would find him no matter what it took.
A hand clamped around her ankle and yanked her back, her body sliding across the stone and back underneath Reyes’s.
He was ready for her with a blade firmly in hand and swinging down in a perfect arc.
Solana had just enough time to shift so that it landed in her shoulder instead of her heart.
The scream he tore from her bounced against the stone walls, his promise echoing in her head through the agony.
The blade pinned her to the ground like an anchor, the purple stone in its hilt winking mockingly, holding her in the moment and preventing her from rifting. Reyes towered over her, his eyes devastated, his body at odds with itself as he fought Killian’s compulsion.
“Please,” she whispered to him, to the gods, to herself. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that killing her would be the death of him, and him of her. She wouldn’t allow that to be their story.
Blood poured from the wound and collected on the ground underneath her. She felt its warm stickiness coating her back and arm, felt her life seeping away with every throb of her heart. Her stupid, beating heart at the core of every stupid, reckless idea.
Ripping the blade out of her shoulder took more strength and willpower than she thought she possessed. She screamed again, this time a guttural roar, and just as she was free, Reyes had reached the end of his strength to fight against himself.
It didn’t matter. She needed him close, so she wrapped her hand around his neck and pulled him flush against her body, cried out as his dagger slipped into her side, and held on to life for long enough to rift them back home.
The table they landed on collapsed underneath the weight of them.
There were screams and gasps, voices she couldn’t differentiate saying words she couldn’t decipher.
Hands everywhere, reaching, yanking, stemming the flow of blood from her shoulder and side.
Reyes was ripped away, and then Cora’s face appeared above her, haloed in a haze of firelight.
Cora’s mouth moved, the lines between her brow deep as she said something important, but Solana rolled away and dragged herself to where Oskar, Jacobi, and Suri held Reyes pinned to the ground.
Their bodies lay over his limbs as he thrashed and snarled like a wild animal.
His head beat against the ground over and over until she thought it would burst apart.
She pushed past Oskar and crawled over Reyes’s body. Grasped his face in both hands.
Blood dripped from her shoulder onto his neck and ran down in rivers of garish red, mingling with his blood that seeped from small gashes and scrapes on his bruised flesh.
Reyes’s eyes were wild, but they locked onto hers like an anchor in the middle of a raging sea.
He saw her. His soul recognized hers, and she felt him like she had before—a cool, familiar touch.
A thread that joined and bound them together.
And his well of magic was full to bursting, unused but leashed under the collar of his father’s making. Their magic was so similar, but where Killian’s was a persuasion of the mind, Reyes’s persuaded the body, encouraged it to mend and heal and thrive.
His gift was life where Solana’s was death.
In him, she saw that he could consume her.
Swallow her gift until it was nothing but ashes and memories, but she dove headfirst into the waters of his well anyway, deep enough that there was no room for anything else.
No beginning or end, no space where Reyes wasn’t all she knew and loved.
Fight, she ordered him. All of her strength poured into that one command. She chanted it over and over, her lips skimming against his forehead, his cheek, his lips, while the weight of the four of them combined held him down.
The gray of his eyes disappeared and turned wholly white. Beneath her, his body began to tremble. Still, she poured into him, gave him all her strength so that he could fight his father’s hold over his mind.
With one bloodied hand, she reached out and clasped the himaya in the middle of the collar.
It was like cracking open a shell to reach the meat inside, but the shell was almost impenetrable, familiar yet painfully strange.
She could taste her own gift and the corruption it underwent mixed with Killian’s.
A toxic combination of control and persuasion, tenacity and greed.
The more of herself she poured into the stone and Reyes, the more diluted Killian’s control became, but the bulk of her strength stemmed from one place. Her hand resting over the himaya. Her blood pouring into the stone, saturating it until it was full to bursting.
Reyes was right—the answers had always been there, running through the veins beneath her skin.
Solana knew the moment it worked. She felt the himaya shatter, the collar snap apart, and Reyes’s awareness like a bolt of lightning that tossed her across the room.
There was nothing left of her to feel pain from hitting the wall.
She was adrift in a sea of emptiness, the closest to death she had ever been.
The voices of muki across Supay called to her, discordant and desperate, begging to be set free but entirely out of reach.
She would have to separate them from their collars one by one, endless amounts of blood to saturate and destroy.
But there was no power left for her to wield. No blood to keep her from the chilling grip of the curse, much less steal the muki from Killian’s control. The dark was swallowing her, inviting her to rest, to be still, and Solana was so tired of fighting.
Dying was a quiet affair. Body numb and hearing muffled, Solana settled into the emptiness with the bleak acceptance that came with knowing she had done the best she could. There were others in the room, but she couldn’t see them. In the end, she was alone. Just as she had always assumed.
How much time she had wasted fearing fate and death when it had come for her all the same.
There was a flash in the unyielding night, and Solana thought it a last peek at the light before it was gone forever, but a rush of cold flooded her veins.
Enough so that she could suddenly taste the tang of blood and agony, feel the collapse of her body that had given too much and the pressure of familiar arms trying to hold her together.
Perhaps this would be her final moment and memory.
Her last opportunity to tell Reyes what she hadn’t thought she was capable of feeling.
As if outside herself, she stretched out a hand, seeking his face that she knew so well, determined to die with the press of his lips on her fingertips.
“I love you,” she tried to tell him, the truth fusing into her skin and blood and bones until it was all she felt.
“Godsdamn you.” Reyes’s voice pierced through the haze of half death, burned through to the core of her pathetic acceptance. “Stop saying goodbye and live. Do not give up now.”
Another stab of cold punched through the heat of her blood and demanded to be received.
She remembered how agonizing it had been to be healed by Reyes, how her body fought his gift at every turn.
Let me in, he had said, and she thought she had, but she knew now that it was her blood that had fought against him, that it had been out of her control.
Now she had a choice, and Reyes was begging her to choose him, to choose life. An unknown future stretching ahead of her like a distant, dangling hope.
Solana wanted it so bad it hurt. Dying was easy, but living was not. It required her to put aside everything she had held on to for so long—resentment and anger, purpose and pride. It required her to open her hands and finally, fully accept everything Reyes had to offer.
The coolness of life washed over her. Fingers of ice prodded to knit and mend.
Her chest filled with breath and the darkness ebbed, and there it was, the gray of a storm, the glint of a sword, the promise of a future.
His gift curled around her mind and soul and caressed the parts of her that were dark and unlovable.
It whispered to her doubts and fears that they were valid, but they would not hold her back any longer.
The pain slowly disappeared as she absorbed his healing, as she believed in herself, as she yearned for more of his touch. It was Reyes’s love that led her back onto the shores of life.
With a gasp, she woke to him bowed over her, eyes red rimmed and sparkling like moonlight on the surface of an endless sea.
In them, she saw the depths of his love.
The lengths he would have gone to save her again and again.
His lips stretched into a wide smile, the pulse at his neck fluttering madly as he laughed and pulled her into him, his fingers clawing at her clothes and skin as if he could fuse their bodies together, never to part.
Without saying anything, she rifted them to her home. The place that had held her and raised her and molded her. The landing was soft and controlled. Her well was full of the clearest water she had ever sipped, and in his arms, she was stronger than ever before.
She raised a hand to his cheek and opened her mouth to speak, but Reyes cut her off. “I swear to the gods, if you say I’m sorry one more time, I will never let you leave this bed.”
“That might not be as much of a punishment as you think,” she whispered into his mouth.
The taste of him was like a spring after a long rain, fresh and bountiful.
He tasted her back, his tongue tracing the curve of her mouth like it had been made solely for him and he had never had anything so fulfilling.
Solana didn’t apologize, but she did murmur against his ear, “I thought I wasn’t capable of love. Afraid that who I am would destroy you.”
Reyes’s hands cupped her face. His thumbs dug into her cheeks and held her so tight that the only thing she could see was him.
“Destroy me, Solana. Tear me apart and put me back together with the pieces of me that have only ever known you, because who I am after you is the only person I want to be.”
The strength of his conviction was crushing, and she folded beneath him eagerly, willing to lay herself bare in the hopes that he would devour her, and understand her, and compliment her.
There was little time to do all the things they wanted to do, but Solana made sure to trace each line of the stories inked onto his skin, imagined that it was her story, their story that would forever mark his heart. Regardless of how it ended.
For the truth of it was, Solana didn’t know if she would survive what was to come.
There might be nothing left of her when this was over except this moment, this memory.
While Reyes pressed a trail of kisses from her lips to her thighs, she whispered her secrets to him.
The times that she felt unworthy and unloved.
Lost and alone. The small things that gave her hope that she was too afraid to fully feel.
The way that his very first words to her, I’ve been looking for you, imprinted themselves onto her heart and made her feel seen for the first time in so long.
Solana didn’t have to tell him what she wanted, because he already knew.
He pressed into her achingly slow, holding her eyes as he filled her.
Kissing her lips as he loved her in the way nobody else had before.
She savored every thrust, every breath that brought him nearer to the edge, every touch that claimed her heart and soul.
They were the perfect culmination of all their mistakes and foolish ideas and wishful longings, and as Reyes grabbed her hips and pulled her closer, pushed deeper so that she wasn’t sure where he ended and she began, she chose to believe that each and every moment that she had fought through had brought her there, to this slice of time, to his arms.