CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE #2
Ford leaned closer, fingers hovering inches from the edge of Ronan’s wings. “Just let me see if they feel the same—”
Ronan didn’t even turn. “Do you enjoy breathing?”
Ford’s hand froze. “Honestly? Not as much as I enjoy annoying you.”
Smoke shot out, snapping for Ford’s throat as he jumped back. “Okay! No touching, got it.”
“Don’t take it personally,” I muttered. “He’s a very delicate creature. I’ve never seen him let anyone near those things.” My lips curved. “They must be very sensitive.”
Ford wheezed beside me, and Ronan just stared, wings still stretched, expression storm-dark and unimpressed.
A low growl sounded from the trees and I waved Elysian off. “Down, boy.”
Ronan’s eyes shot to him before settling back on me. In a flash of white, skin turned to fur, and Elysian disappeared into the forest.
“I do see it,” Ford added. “He just needs to stick out his tongue and it’s a perfect match.” His eyes had closed, though this time Ronan let him rest.
“Mm, no. That’s a snake,” I corrected.
“Okay.” Ford groaned, pushing himself from the ground. “You’ve lost me. I’m going back to sleep in the comfort of my dirt bed.”
He shuffled toward the tent, leaving Ronan and I in the hush of the fire’s glow. It was momentarily peaceful with nothing but the crackling flames between us.
Until my stomach growled, loudly, and Ronan asked, “Do you need some blood?”
The words jarred me upright, my head snapping toward him. His stare was already on me, assessing my entirety.
“What?” I couldn’t decide if I was flattered that he took notice of my hunger or offended that he thought blood would satisfy it.
He sluggishly pointed to my stomach. “I can hear it.”
I reared back, grimacing. “So, you think blood is going to fix that?”
His hands shot up. “I don’t know how it works. You keep going for my throat with your damned fangs. I figured, maybe you fed on blood too.”
A noise of disgust tore out of me, my tongue hanging from my mouth like I could scrape the thought away. “Gods, no. You think I just wander around daydreaming about drinking everyone’s gore?”
Even as I spat the words, the truth burned low in my chest. I didn’t dream about everyone’s blood. Hardly thought of it at all.
Just his.
Even from here, I could smell it running through the veins, pulsing deeply in his neck. Spice and iron. Heat and smoke.
And it terrified me how desperately I wanted to taste it again.
We had sat together by the fire for an hour before Ronan’s lashes had begun to flutter closed, his arm slipping from behind his head.
Another hour had passed since then, and I had almost finished memorizing every inch of his face.
The thick brow, interrupted by the scar cleaving it in two. The beauty mark hidden just above the corner of his mouth. The rough stubble shadowing a sculpted jaw.
His chest rose and fell with the rhythm of sleep, and once, just once, his upper lip twitched, tugging the scar into a phantom smirk.
My hand lifted before I could stop it, knuckles hovering close enough to feel the burn off his cheek. I didn’t know why I wanted to touch him.
Didn’t know why every day something in me leaned, drawn like the stars are chained to the dark.
Hatred would explain it. That’s what I told myself. It often felt like heat, like hunger. But this wasn’t clean like fury.
I curled my hand into a fist and withdrew. Whatever this was, this slow, inexorable gravity, it would end in disaster.
It shivered through me, the way the world knows a storm is coming before the first flash of light. So, I sat on my hands and stared at the fire until the wanting dulled to an ache I could pretend was nothing at all.
My legs cramped as I stretched them, hips groaning in protest after weeks of riding. A curse slipped past my lips as I whispered to myself, “Gods, I have to pee.”
I jabbed Ronan in the chest. He didn’t stir, didn’t so much as flinch. Fine, I’d have to be quick. Edge of the trees, in and out, nothing more.
The forest was still beyond the threshold, yet...I hesitated. Anything could be waiting, and it took me a moment to understand why that bothered me so much. Another instant and I would have poisoned that thought straight from my mind.
But Ronan’s voice slid from him in a fog. “You never sleep.”
Looking to him, mine followed. “Neither do you. Which is why I was trying to be quiet.”
“Mine’s by choice.” It lacked the bite of command I was used to from him.
A brush of wind moved through the camp, tugging at strands of my hair. “Who chooses not to sleep?”
“Those who don’t trust what hides in the dark.” His lashes lifted, eyes honed on the flames. “I’m assuming you know what that’s like.”
“It’s not the darkness I avoid. It’s the nightmares.” It slipped out like a confession. One I didn’t bother taking back.
His eyes moved to me. “Do they ever mutter anything useful when you allow them in?”
I shot him a look, one I always gave when I didn’t want anyone to see how tired I was beneath it all. “Only that you’re worse in person.”
The faintest curl touched his mouth. “Then at least they’re honest.” His eyes drifted close once more, hands finding their home beneath his head. “Just go relieve yourself. Quickly.”
I patted his head, grinning when one eye peeked open to glare at me. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” I promised. “And then you can go back to bed, princess.”
Before he could answer, I jolted upright, sidestepping the flames as I moved toward the trees.
“No wandering,” he grunted.
With three fingers pressed to my brow in promise, I slipped past Nezra’s illusion. The barrier vibrated as I crossed it, its heartbeat momentarily in tune with my own.
The air outside it was thick, firelight replaced by a breath of raw soil. I glanced back, where Ronan lay exactly as I’d left him, lashes lowered, chest rising slowly, hands tucked behind his head like these woods, and everything in them, weren’t hungry.
As if they weren’t watching.
I found a thick oak, deeming its trunk wide enough to hide me, and crouched into its shadow, letting the moss bite into the soles of my boots.
I should have felt safe hidden here but the murk of night, the silence it brought, felt too deep. My arms found their way around my chest as I listened, for whatever was hidden, to give themselves away.
The branches overhead bent closer, knotted, twisted, reaching for me like fingers. I blinked when one of them shifted.
Something was here.
Not near enough to touch, but enough to feel. A weight at the end of my senses like an unseen hand pressed to the base of my spine. I glimpsed back, through the black weave of branches, to where Ronan was stretched by the fire. It was nothing but a calm, unlit forest now.
The chill clung to me as I hurried back through the trees, toward where the illusion beckoned, like a tear in the world’s fabric. The magic caught the moon’s glare, a glimmer too precise to be natural, reflecting where it shouldn’t be.
I pressed through, the veil parting over my skin, and when I stepped back into camp, I paused. The fire still crackled, low, and empty.
Ronan wasn’t there.
My stomach dropped, eyes immediately shooting to Elva’s tent where it lay undisturbed. No footprints, no scuff of boot or shift of fabric to suggest anyone had moved.
Then a sound scattered behind me. Steel slid free before I had the thought to even draw it. I spun, dagger gleaming, every nerve taut—
Ronan stood, half shrouded in twilight, shirt untucked, hair disheveled.
My grip on the blade tightened. “What are you doing?”
The scarred brow lifted, before he smoothed back the strands dangling in his face. “Just stretching my legs.”
I didn’t lower the dagger, not when his expression gave nothing, the glow of both fire and moon making his features dance between him and another form entirely.
He chuckled, then strode past me, as if I hadn’t caught him lurking, and dropped back to his place by the flames.
After a heartbeat, I joined him.
The warmth licked my skin, but the shiver I’d carried in the woods didn’t leave me. And as Ronan sat across from me, wings now gone, gaze fixed on the embers, I couldn’t shake the thought—
That whatever I’d felt out there...had followed me back in.
The moon drifted toward the faraway mountain’s serrated crown, a slow, taunting descent into dawn. We sat beside one another as smoke curled above the dying fire, its flames rooting red into the graying sky.
The more I studied Ronan’s features, the more I noticed the constant clench of his jaw, the furrow carved deep between his thick brows. Like the weight of it all refused to leave him even in the calmness.
“The Wraith.” It drifted from my thoughts to my tongue, and off my lips too easily.
Ronan’s head shot toward me. “What?”
“Your name.” My hand drew down his body. “The one that makes you so utterly terrifying.”
Instead of bristling, his expression shifted. Sadness replacing what should have been scorn. His broad shoulders folded in, actually folded, as he let out an exhausted sigh. “I didn’t pick it.”
I’d always wondered if his title came from his own cruel choice, or if it’d been born under rumor and blood, the way terror often grew.
I shrugged, forcing lightness into my tone as I slid my hand through the coil of haze. “It does seem rather gloomy for such an arrogant beast who swears he isn’t grumpy.”
My wink went unseen. His stare was fixated on the way his power intertwined with the fire, smothering the flames until they burst back up in an onyx funnel.
“It was shouted at me,” he confessed. “By a mother after I executed her son.”
The way he said it, like it wasn’t only the crown that bent his shoulders, but the ghosts of every sin, every echo of choice that scarred.