Chapter 32 #3
Julianna took back her hands, and the loss of her skin against his left him cold.
“And with all of that power will come a host of enemies. People who will take her from us both in an attempt to harm you. A wife who will carry an undying vengeance at you having a child with someone else. With someone like me.”
“I dare them to try,” Ozik snarled. “And I told you, it is not what it seems. I have no intention of marrying that woman.”
Julianna wiped a stray tear from her face. Steeled her expression in that unfathomable way of hers. The strongest woman he had ever known. “Ellena cannot be fodder in the cross fires of your future. Surely you know that.”
Ozik shook his head. Reaching out, he gripped the gate just so he would have something to hold on to. “You can’t go anywhere; I won’t allow it.”
Juliana tilted her head, dark magic swirling up her arms in menacing threads of black. “You have always been bold, Ozik, but never so painfully wrong.”
The pulses of her magic filled the space around them. Julianna didn’t take kindly to his commands, not in the early days of knowing her or any of the days that followed. Perhaps that was part of the allure—she was not like his mother, or Diana, or any other woman he had known.
“Go,” she demanded. “The sun is setting.”
“Jul—”
“I said go,” she snapped. Her magic flew from her in tendrils, a warning if Ozik had ever seen one. He had not known Julianna at her lowest, but if it was anything like the other Veragi witches he’d read about, he didn’t want to be near her if she lost control.
But he also didn’t want to send her back to their daughter like this.
Julianna turned and walked toward the house. Ozik touched the necklace in his pocket. She could see reason if he just showed her his version of the future. The things he knew that the Ohros witches did not. The truths that they could never see, because they lived inside Ozik.
“Marry me,” Ozik said.
Julianna stopped in her tracks, just in front of the house. She wrapped her handwoven shawl around her shoulders tighter, staring at him like she wasn’t sure she heard him correctly.
“Marry me,” Ozik said again. He couldn’t help himself. He walked through the gate and up the pathway to the house, giving her all the time she needed to back away.
But she didn’t.
Ozik swept a strand of hair away from Julianna’s eyes, savoring the feel of his fingertips against her skin. She had never let him back in again, not after she’d learned she was with child. Seven years pulsed between them, and he had longed for her in every single one.
Julianna pulled away. “Don’t. Don’t say things you do not mean.”
He caught her hand with his own, tugging her back to him. He used his free hand to pluck the necklace from his pocket and display it for her. “I mean it. I mean every word,” he assured her.
There was a hardness to Julianna after what he’d put her through.
The way her life had been forced into a box of Ozik’s making.
She could not find work. She could not marry someone else.
All she had was what he had given her, and his gut twisted when he thought of the consequences she paid for both their actions.
He wanted so desperately to soften her once more.
And at the sight of the necklace, soften she did. Tentatively, she reached, running her finger along the links.
Any trace of the dark Veragi magic on her fingers and wrists disappeared. She gasped, pulling her hand back. “Ozik, what is that?”
“It is part of my family’s anchor,” he told her. “It binds you to me, and through me, to Zetyr. My god will protect you. If you wear this, my father cannot harm you.”
Julianna’s breathing sped up. “Ozik—”
“I mean it,” he interrupted. “Don’t leave. I don’t think I will survive it. Take this, and then when I earn my father’s magic, marry me.”
She inspected the links of the necklace, the small black stone within it. The raw edges, the piece broken from a larger chunk. “When I touch it, I cannot feel my magic. It goes silent.”
Ozik furrowed his brow and watched as Julianna’s eyes lost focus, as a subtle white glow emanated from them. She came back to him almost instantly, her eyes lifting to his.
Something so unreadable crossed her features.
Her voice came out a whisper. “You cannot marry me. You need magic, Ozik. Someone to fuel your power.”
He didn’t understand or deign to guess what Veragi had just spoken to Julianna, but she wasn’t running.
She wasn’t asking him to leave. He curled his fingers around the necklace and put it back into his pocket.
“Then I will make it so. I will find someone willing, for surely I have something that they need. And until then, bargain with me.” His hand brushed up her arm and curled to her waist, pulling her into him. She didn’t push away.
And so he took a risk. “I will offer you a kiss for every one.” He dropped his mouth to within inches of hers, almost kissing her, almost tasting her, until he pressed his lips to her neck.
She sighed in his arms. He trailed his finger along the curve of her ribcage, up to the neckline of her dress.
He drew a line where the fabric met the skin of her breast just as his mouth brushed her ear. “A touch for each agreement we make.”
She curled into him, her body loosening with each word. Her magic coasted around them in tendrils of black. With the skim of his fingertips along her collarbone, she shivered.
“Be my wife,” he whispered again. “I will keep you both safe. We will give Ellena siblings. Brothers. Heirs. The most beautiful family this world has ever seen.”
He had the distinct fear that she wouldn’t believe him. That she would shirk his words and his intentions because that was the fair thing to do. It was what he deserved. In every way, he had failed her.
But not anymore.
His fingers curled around the nape of her neck, and he pulled back just enough to tilt her face up to his. Tears welled in Julianna’s dark blue eyes, an admission of vulnerability he had not seen from her in years. “And if the city does not agree?”
“I am the city,” Ozik told her. “And the people will fall to their knees.”
She was at war; he could see it in the rise and fall of her breath, in the way her fingers curled tightly into his shirt.
“You have given me the world. Let me give you a lifetime,” Ozik whispered.
At his words, she closed the space between their lips.
Her mouth met his, and Ozik groaned low in his throat.
He tangled his fingers into her hair. And he kissed her.
He kissed her with seven years in the making, with the heat of every moment he’d looked upon her and could not have her.
There was no comparable happiness. It did not get bigger than this moment.
She fisted his shirt and pulled them to the door, their bodies pressing to the house he had built, until she fumbled with the knob, never breaking their mouths apart.
He gathered Julianna up in his arms, the feel of her body summoning a memory from so long ago.
A memory of hope. Of need. Of breathless fate that could be molded into whatever Ozik wanted it to be.
He would give anything for this woman. For their daughter.
“Let me in again,” he begged against her mouth.
“Let me worship you like our gods intended.”
She tugged him through the threshold, the two of them practically falling into the small house.
Passing the hallway that led to Ellena’s room and plunging straight into Julianna’s on the opposite side.
The four walls were small yet limitless—quaint, but more like home than he had ever felt on his vast estate.
As he slowly peeled off Julianna’s clothes, as he kissed every inch of her skin, he didn’t care for the dead or the living or the concept of fate at all.
He thought he could make it himself, as he always thought when he was with her.
And when he buried himself inside her, when she blushed at her nakedness and then moaned with her pleasure, he thought himself an oracle in his own right.
As they lay together, she turned in the crook of his body, his chest to her back. She swept the hair from the nape of her neck, making room for the necklace. An invitation, an agreement. As he latched the clasp, he pressed a kiss to where it settled on her neck.
“Say yes,” he whispered into her hair. “Say you’ll marry me.”
And that look on her face when she finally gave herself over to him, when she whispered yes and agreed to the future he’d written, burned into his mind. The image held a place there, a home, unmoving and equally unforgiving, for the rest of Ozik’s life.