Chapter 17
He crosses the room in three strides, and his mouth finds mine before I finish breathing.
This kiss is different from the one in the alcove.
That one had been desperate, a man confirming I was real.
This one is hungry. This one happens behind a closed door with no audience and nowhere else to be.
Kaelren kisses me like he has been carrying a list of everything he wanted to do the moment we were alone. Now he starts at the top.
His hands grip my waist and lift me off the ground.
My legs wrap around him instinctively, and he carries me backward until my spine meets the wall.
The living wood is warm against my back and gives slightly under the impact, cushioning me.
Under normal circumstances, I might find that fascinating.
At the moment, I can barely think about anything except his mouth and his hands and the indistinct sound he makes against my lips when I pull his hair.
“I have thought about this,” he says between kisses, his voice rough against my jaw, “every day since you scattered.”
“Every day?”
“Every hour.” His teeth graze along the side of my neck, and I feel it all the way to my toes.
“Every minute I held that locket and felt nothing. Just silence where you used to be. I thought about your mouth. Your voice. The way you taste.” He bites down gently where my neck meets my shoulder, and I gasp.
“I thought about what I would do when I had you alone again.”
“And what did you decide?”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. His silver eyes are dark, the pupils blown wide, and the corruption marks along his jaw pulse in time with his heartbeat. He looks wrecked and dangerous all at once, like a man standing at the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to jump.
“Everything,” he says quietly. “I decided everything.”
Then he kisses me again, slower this time, deeper, and carries me away from the wall toward the bed. He sets me down on the edge of it and drops to his knees in front of me.
The sight stops my breath.
Kaelren does not kneel. I have seen him stand in front of thrones and refuse to bow. I have watched him face kings, councils, and monsters with the same unbending spine. This is a man who fights his way through worlds instead of lowering himself to them.
And now he is on his knees in front of me.
The realization lands somewhere deep and instinctive, something older than reason. He is not surrendering. He is choosing me.
His hands slide up my thighs and his fingers curl into the waistband of my pants. He pauses there, looking up at me with those silver eyes.
“Tell me to stop,” he says quietly, “and I stop.”
“If you stop,” I reply, “I will personally end you.”
The corner of his mouth twitches.
Then his hands move, my pants are gone, and his mouth presses against the inside of my knee. Every coherent thought leaves my head in a single rush.
He takes his time. Of course he does. Kaelren does everything with precision and intent, and apparently that includes taking me apart with his mouth.
He works up the inside of my thigh with slow, open kisses while his hands grip my hips to keep me steady.
His breath is hot against my skin. Every few inches he pauses, presses his lips harder, drags his teeth lightly, and waits for the sound I make before moving higher.
“You’re doing this on purpose,” I manage.
“I am doing everything on purpose.” His mouth reaches the crease where my thigh meets my hip, and he lingers there, breathing against me.
He is close enough that I can feel the heat of him, but not where I need it.
“I have had months to plan how I want to worship you when I had you again, Elle. I will not rush.”
The word worship sends a shiver through me that he definitely feels. His grip tightens on my hips, and his exhale turns uneven.
“You have no idea,” he breathes, his voice vibrating against my skin, “what it did to me. Losing you. Holding that locket against my chest every night. Talking to you like you could hear me, knowing you probably couldn't.”
“I felt you.” My voice comes out smaller than I intended. “In the void. Not words. But through the bond. I could feel you pulling, like you were pressing your hand against a wall you could not break through.”
He goes still. His forehead rests against my thigh, and for a moment he simply breathes. I watch his shoulders rise and fall. His hands tighten slightly on my hips.
Something in him has just broken open.
“You felt me,” he whispers.
“The whole time. It kept me anchored.”
He lifts his head and looks at me. His eyes are bright with something he would show no one else. Then he lowers his mouth exactly where I need him, and I stop being capable of forming sentences.
He is thorough and devastating. He uses his tongue, his lips, and his fingers with the same focused intensity he brings to battle strategy.
He reads every sound I make, every shift of my hips, every catch in my breath, and adjusts accordingly.
When I moan, he repeats whatever caused it.
When I gasp, he pauses long enough to let the tension build before doing it again, harder.
My marks begin to glow down my arms and across my chest, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. His corruption marks respond in kind. Dark veins flicker along his forearms where his hands grip my thighs. Where our skin touches, the light and the dark meet in a thin line of heat that hums between us.
The room responds too.
The Verdance is alive, and apparently it has opinions about what is happening inside it.
The flowering vines along the window begin to bloom.
Pale blue blossoms open one after another, releasing a warm, sweet scent that is faintly intoxicating.
The moss on the walls brightens, shifting from green-gold to a deeper amber that softens the entire room.
The bed itself adjusts beneath me. The living wood subtly reshapes its surface, becoming softer.
“The room is—” I begin.
Then he does something with his tongue that erases the concept of rooms entirely.
He slides two fingers inside me and curls them. I grab the edge of the bed so hard the living wood flexes beneath my grip. The moss along the walls pulses brighter. The vines bloom faster. New buds open across the window and trail up the wall and onto the ceiling.
Petals begin to fall.
Small and pale, they drift down through the amber light like quiet snow.
“Kaelren.” His name comes out broken. “Please.”
He does not speed up. He keeps the same deliberate pace, building the pressure inside me until it feels like a tide that refuses to stop rising. He knows exactly how close I am. I can see it in the set of his shoulders and the focus in his eyes.
He is keeping me there on purpose.
“Please,” I say again. I have never begged for anything in my life, and apparently that line has finally moved. “Kaelren, I need—”
“I know what you need.”
His voice is rough and certain. He presses his fingers deeper, finds the exact place that makes my vision go white, and seals his mouth over me with relentless precision.
The release hits like a breaking wave.
My whole body arches off the bed. My marks flare, flooding the room with bright light. I feel him groan against me as the sensation crashes through both of us. The bond sends the pleasure back through him, echoing hard enough to keep the waves rolling.
The petals fall faster. The vines climb higher. The moss blazes amber-gold.
The room itself seems to breathe out.
He works me through the aftermath with careful touches until I finally push his head away with shaking hands.
He presses one last kiss against the inside of my thigh. The gesture is soft and almost reverent. Then he rises and settles onto the bed beside me.
I am trembling. The trembling that comes after your body has detonated and is trying to remember how to exist again.
He pulls me against his chest and wraps both arms around me. His heartbeat pounds against my shoulder blade. I can feel how tightly wound he still is. The tension in his arms. The uneven rhythm of his breathing.
I reach for the hem of his shirt.
“Your turn.”
He catches my hand before I can lift it further. He brings it to his mouth and presses his lips to my knuckles one by one.
“No,” he says.
“No?”
“Not tonight.” He keeps my hand against his mouth. “Tonight I needed to know you are real. That you are here. That your body still answers mine the way it did before the void took you.”
He kisses my wrist, right over the pulse point.
“I needed to feel you fall apart and come back together again. I needed to hear my name in your mouth and know you meant it.”
“I always mean it.”
“I know.”
He pulls me closer until my head rests in the hollow of his shoulder and his chin settles on my hair.
“Soon,” he murmurs, “I am going to do everything I imagined for the last six months. And I am going to take my time doing it.”
His voice drops lower.
“I am going to learn every new mark on your body. I am going to make you say my name in ways you have not invented yet. And when I finish, I am going to start over again. Once will never be enough.”
My chest tightens with the strange sweetness of being wanted by someone who nearly lost you.
“Is that a promise?”
“That is a vow.”
His hand slides slowly up my spine and settles between my shoulder blades.
“But tonight,” he continues quietly, “I just want to hold you. I want to fall asleep knowing you are breathing. I want to wake up and feel you beside me and know it is real.”
The petals have stopped falling. The vines along the window have settled into a heavy bloom. The moss dims to a warm glow that turns the chamber into something like the inside of a lantern.
I press closer to him.
“You really talked to me,” I say softly. “Through the locket.”
“Every night,” he answers. “I told you about the iterations. About Peeble being impossible. About every version of you I found.”
His fingers move slowly through my hair.
“I told you I was coming for you. That I would not stop.”
“You didn’t.”
“No.”
He presses his lips to the top of my head.
For a while neither of us speaks. His hand keeps moving through my hair in slow, steady strokes as the frantic energy that drove him since my return finally settles.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him.
“Give me a few minutes,” he murmurs.
“Take all the time you need.”
He does.
His breathing gradually slows, and I feel the exact moment his body fully
I stay awake a little longer.
I listen to his heartbeat. I feel the quiet pulse of the Verdance in the surrounding walls. I watch the last petals settle across the blanket in the amber light.
Outside the window, the living city glows green and gold. It has survived everything thrown at it and still stands.
The man I love sleeps with his arms around me for the first time in months.
I close my eyes.
For the first time in a long time, I do not dream of the void.