54. Eradin #2
His mouth found me where I ached for him most.
A sound tore out of me that I’d never admit to in daylight.
I latched onto the grass, his hair, anywhere I could hold, and he groaned against me as though the taste of me was the only thing he’d ever wanted.
The bond turned molten. I felt what he did.
My thighs trembling under his hands, my breath coming apart, the way I came alive under his tongue.
All of it looped back through him and into me, doubling, until the world shrank to his mouth and the murmur of the river.
He gave the way he did everything. Patient. Relentless. Unwilling to settle for less than all of me. When my hips tried to chase him, he pinned them beneath one splayed hand and stayed exactly where I needed him, winding the ache tighter, tighter, until it drew to a single unbearable point.
Then it broke.
Pleasure tore through me, white and total, and I shattered under the open cavern sky with his name breaking on my tongue.
Through the bond, his pleasure crested with mine, a groan dragged out of him as though he’d ridden every wave I did.
He didn’t stop until the last tremor left me, gentling me down with his mouth until I lay wrung out and boneless in the grass.
Only then did he draw back up my body and kiss me. I tasted myself there, and the low, wrecked sound he made against my lips undid something in me all over again.
“You said we should sleep.” His grin came slow, wicked, warm as he settled beside me, his hand splaying over my bare hip. “Forgive me for not listening.”
I didn’t have a single clever thing left to say.
He righted my pants with gentle hands, drawing the laces closed, and pressed one last kiss below my navel.
When he finally let go, his fingers trailed across my waist.
I stood on unsteady legs. My skin still hummed where he’d touched me.
“Go to bed, Feral,” he whispered. “Dream of me.”
I didn’t look back as I walked to my tent. I counted steps to keep myself from turning around. Seven. Eight. Nine.
His awareness tracked me the entire way, the bond pulling tighter with every step of distance between us.
At the tent flap, I did finally peer back.
Fen sat where I’d left him, his hand still resting on the grass where I’d sat beside him.
I made myself duck inside before I crossed back to him.
I lay down and sleep dragged me under before I could fight it, and it sucked me into…
Stone bit into my knees.
In my dream, I knelt on a cliff edge, the drop beyond swallowing light. Bones scattered across the stone beneath me. Too many to count. Picked clean. Some still carried scraps of leather that might’ve been tack.
Pressure crushed my chest, grinding my ribs together. I couldn’t think past the weight of—
A hand touched my shoulder.
I spun. Tolross stood there, whole and healthy, with color in his cheeks. Just like in the trial.
Relief flooded through me so fast my vision blurred. “You’re alright.”
“You chose him over me.” His voice came out deadened. “And now you’ll watch him die anyway.”
“I didn’t choose anyone over you.”
“Look.”
He pointed, and I turned.
Fen stood on the opposite shore of a big body of water. His hands reached toward me, his mouth forming my name, but the sound couldn’t cross the distance.
I floundered into the water and tried to swim, but the current pulled me under. Water filled my lungs, burning, choking. I clawed toward the surface as hands latched onto my ankles, dragging me deeper.
When I finally broke through the top, gasping, Fen was gone. Only bones remained on the shore where he’d been standing. Red lines covered them, the same ones marking my palms.
I stumbled out of the water and dropped to my knees in the black sand.
My hands moved, trying to heal bones picked clean. The red lines spread from my palms onto the remains, searching for life that wasn’t there.
“You’re too late,” Tolross said. He smiled down at me without warmth. “Was it worth it?”
I lunged for him, but he dissolved into smoke with the taint of funeral pyres.
When I turned back, the bones were gone. Fen stood where they’d been, alive, his hand extended.
“Don’t come closer,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll kill you. That’s what my magic does.” My voice broke. “My mother. Tolross. Now you. Everything I touch dies.”
“That’s not true.”
“Look at your hands.”
Red lines covered his palms, spreading up his arms in an infection.
“It’s alright,” he said softly. “I’d rather die by your hands than anyone else’s.”
I jolted awake, gasping, and rose, slipping back outside.
Fen sat on his bedroll, staring at the flickering coals, his shoulders hunched forward, his good hand pressed against his chest where the bond thrummed.
He looked up, and the relief that flooded through our connection made my knees weaken.
“I dreamed you died,” I said, the words tumbling out. “I was too slow, or I made the wrong choice.”
He rose and crossed the space between us. His hands framed my face, his thumbs brushing away tears I hadn’t realized were falling. I leaned into the touch, turning my face into his palm, savoring his warmth. This man was real. Not bones or smoke or dreams that lied.
“I’m here,” he whispered. “We’re both here.”
“For now.”
“For now is enough.”
We both knew it wasn’t, but it was all we had.
His hand slid from my face to the back of my neck, his fingers threading into my hair.
He pulled me forward gently and kissed my forehead, a chaste, soft kiss, nothing like the desperate claiming from before.
It felt more intimate.
When he pulled back, his breath whispered across my skin. “If I don’t see tomorrow—”
“Don’t.”
“If I don’t,” he said, his voice firm, “know that I’ll seek you always. I have no right to be with you, but my body doesn’t know how to do anything else.”
I grabbed onto his tunic, crushing the fabric. “You’re going to see tomorrow. We both are.”
“Promise me.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Do it anyway.”
“We’ll both see tomorrow,” I said with everything I felt in my soul.
“I saw what you did, but you died instead of me. The bond was showing us something in a dream.”
“The next trial. Death, then.”
“Or a choice.” His hands found mine, and he squeezed.
This alternate realm was either preparing us or taunting us.
He led me over to his bedroll, and we lay down, his arms wrapping around me tight.
Reece cried out. Was he dreaming of the same thing we had? Lyndie’s breathing went ragged.
Time stretched. Hours passed. Or minutes that felt like hours.
Until light exploded around us.
Fen stood over me, blades in his hands.
Reece stumbled from his tent, as did Lyndie, both rubbing the sleep from their eyes.
As I rushed to my feet and shoved the hair out of my eyes, a herald materialized in the center of the meadow, her robes catching light. “The fifth trial begins now.”
The ground bucked beneath my feet. The air fractured with the sound of breaking glass. I had one second to register that the trial wasn’t giving us time to mount before the meadow shattered completely.
I fell through into nothing.
Fen’s terror crashed into mine through the bond.