I inched close to him, my moan swallowed when he claimed my lips, messy and wet.
And even as the world blurred into nothing, even as pleasure snapped through me like lightning, I found myself smiling through the tears, through the kiss, the sex.
Because beneath all the ruin, all the curses and doom, there was this—us.
And it was beautiful.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
SANORA
For seven days, the world outside had gone quiet. It was just us, the house, as though time had bent around us and decided not to move. The rain could fall, the monsters could scream, the sky could shatter—it didn’t matter. Inside, it was just him and me, like we had carved out our own secret existence.
On the first day, I insisted on cooking somethingnormal, something edible. I’d always wanted to learn how to cook, but I never found the time, and eventually I gave up. Until Thrax. Watching him move in the kitchen with that unthinking grace gave me the push. He made chopping and cooking look so natural and mesmerising that I wanted to try.
Turned out, I was a disaster. A hopeless, walking catastrophe in the kitchen. I burnt the food—of course—drowned the stew in salt, nearly took off my fingertip with the knife, and managed to smoke the entire kitchen. Thrax had leaned against the counter the whole time, half-patient with eyes soft with amusement, like he was genuinely charmed by my incompetence.
When he finally stepped behind me, large chest pressing into my back, his hand covering mine on the knife as he murmured,“Like this,”my brain emptied. Forget the food—I forgotmyown name.
I knew he was doing it on purpose, I knew he was enjoying distracting me and feeling the way my body changed. How could I resist the teasing sound of his voice behind my ear and how the heat and evidence of him pressed against my back?
It was hard focusing.
At last, I made a mess of the meal, and he ate it. Every bite. I wasn’t sure he liked it. But he ate it like he did, and that made me concerned for him.
By the third day, he’d decided to teach me one of his “old” games. Ancient cards, strange symbols, and a set of rules that didn’t make sense no matter how many times he explained them. He was infuriatingly good at it, barely glancing at his hand before winning round after round. I accused him of cheating, and suddenly, I started winning. He denied going easy on me, but every time I leapt up in victory, gloating in his face, his laugh gave him away.
I got my revenge by introducing him to my world of memes and silly videos. The kind of internet chaos I’d usually laugh at alone. He stared at the screen like it was sorcery, asking me to explain an inside joke three times before muttering,“Ridiculous.”But his eyes softened every time I laughed, and when I caught him hiding a smile at one of the videos, I knew I’d won.
Nights, though, were different. Our nights were quiet, threaded with a kind of intimacy I hadn’t expected. I’d lay sprawled across him with a book or my phone, reading aloud class notes or passages from history texts I’d highlighted. I let him interrupt with corrections, and he would point out how humans had twisted the truth, or how the stories were missing half of what really happened or shake his head at a complete lie humans had spun into fact and history. Sometimes he’d share truths too heavy for me to process, and I’d just go silent, watching him, feeling like I was listening to something I wasn’t supposed to.
One night, I finally let him flip through my journal—the one I had snatched back and torn from him the first time he touched it. He read through my messy notes, my scribbles, and the half-legible reminders from lectures, stopping now and then to make a dry comment or offer a correction. I’d asked him question after question, things and history topics I couldn’t ask anyone else, and he’d answered patiently. But for every answer he gave, ten more bloomed inside me.
I never asked about the cave. Not once. I saw the way his face changed whenever I got close to mentioning it, and I swallowed the words back down. I knew the cave was tied to how his curse could be broken, I knew because he hated me even brushing against the subject, and I couldn’t bear to push him there, knowing how much he wanted me alive.
And I hadn’t really thought about it. Thrax had not left me long enough to feel bored or quiet to an extent where my mind would wander to the thought of our future.
I knewthiswouldn’t last forever. One day, the world outside would knock on our door and shove us back to reality. I knew the thing between us would eventually end. But I stopped thinking about that and focused only on the day we were in.
By the end of the week, we sat together on my bed, scrolling through lists of possible thesis topics. Thrax leaned against the headboard, posture lazy, but his voice steady as he lectured and corrected me, offering historical facts that made my entire education feel pointless and a waste.
I caught myself staring at him more than once, struck by the irony—I was writing about history while sitting beside someone who was history. A man older than the topics I was researching, whose memory alone could rewrite everything humanity believed.
And in those moments, I didn’t want to write about the past. I wanted to write abouthim. About his truth. But I’d told him I wasn’tgoing to use him for a research purpose, and knowing Thrax, he didn’t care about the truth even one bit.
As I put my legs through my skirt, Thrax watched me dress up as I terrorised him with questions, his back resting lazily against the headboard, eyes calm but brimming with that steady admiration that made my pulse falter, his gaze following every small movement I made. He was nothing but in his boxer briefs, and gods, was he tempting—broad shoulders propped on the pillows, one arm bent behind his head, the other draped across his stomach.
“Is it true,” I asked as I tugged the waistband over my hips, “that when you make a great contribution to the goodness of humanity in your past life, you get an easy next life, full of good luck?”
Thrax shook his head slowly, a faint smile tugging his mouth. “You could just as easily come back as a cat. That ideology was made up by humans to keep more people cultivating good and honest lives.”
I scrunched my face as the amount of things I’d learnt humans made up continued to baffle me. “So reincarnation happens in a shitty way?”
“It happens in a sporadic way,” he explained, voice unhurried. “If one is lucky enough, you may be reincarnated as human five times. With the same face. But it’s a rare thing.”
“Have you ever recognised someone you knew in a past life?”
He shook his head again. “I don’t look at people that hard. I wouldn’t know.”
