"I'll send all the information I have by my eagle," she promised, ignoring him. "Everything I learn. Ships, weapons—“
"Nyssa, I can help you.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re much too valuable to your people to run into this fire," she argued. "These are the flames of every promise my brother and I have ever made. Every promise we made to Drae. Every promise to Draven. All my promises to you and to Lex and to Bala. I have to stoke this on my own. Smoke must rise from these ashes when it all comes crumbling down.”
“I can help you fan it.”
“Why, Nadir?” she asked, tone of agony that she couldn’t suppress. “Why can you not just let me do this?”
“Because I refuse to lose you,” he said. “I have already lost so much to these people. I can't lose you too. You… Do you know how much it pains me to walk away from you each week? To watch as you’re carted back inside that home, knowing what you’re going back to, that you’ll surely be punished for simply speaking with me. Nyssa, I—” He paused, sighing as the thunder boomed over them, and he looked down at the ground.
“Whether you want me here or not, I will be at your side when you escape,” he affirmed, meeting her gaze again. “And it’s not about any need for killing or blood lust. It’s not even about my own people. It’s about you. You… you ferocious little infuriating…thing. You are the only reason I am anywhere near this place without taking them all out under cover of night.”
She fought back her tears. “You really want to help?”
“I do.”
“Then you can help by pulling me out of the void when the smoke consumes my flesh,” she told him. “I don’t know what it will do to me once it starts, especially if I call some of the Noctuans—the voices, their cores connecting to mine, the black flames… I will let go of every wall inside me and surrender my entire being to both. I will be consumed by the darkness. I will lose all control. I will fall into a void. You want me to live? You’ll have to pull me out of it because I don’t know how to do it myself.”
His eyes never left her as the words settled through him, and then finally, after a long moment, he whispered, “Okay,” in a barely audible breath.
Her heart skipped, and she had to clench her jaw at the fact that she’d just admitted such words to him. She sucked in a jagged breath and wiped the fallen tear from her face. But he stepped forward in front of her, and his hands wrapped around hers.
“I will fall into the void at your side before I let it take you from me,” he whispered.
She limped into his embrace. She could feel his heart throbbing beneath her ear. He squeezed his arms around her, his lips pressing to her head again. She looked up, and her eyes closed when he kissed her temple, followed by her cheek, and then he bent as though he would kiss her jaw. But she sighed open-mouthed into his embrace, and her lips caught his.
Heart bleeding, chest caving, knees wavering...
His broad hand pressed to her cheek, lips kissing her over and over as though he were suddenly desperate to never let her go. Her body craved him as she craved sunlight. She hugged her good arm around him to stay steady as he bent her backward and off-balance, his tongue raking hers as he kissed her deeper. The weeks of her being gone combined with the conclusion they'd come to before she ran away poured through them. She couldn’t hold him fast enough, and his hands moved frantically over her, from her cheeks to her waist that he hugged in his hands.
A flash of lightning ricocheted off the cavern walls, followed quickly by the loud crack of thunder just outside. The jolt of it made her jump, her lips pry away from his. Her eyes closed once more as she sighed into his touch, holding his head in the crook of her neck as he held her.
She wanted to pause the world, hold herself there at that moment for as long as she could. Her heart felt as though it would burst at any moment.
His lips pressed hard to hers again, sucking the inhale that she’d just taken. They wavered, and he pulled back to lay his forehead against hers, his mouth agape. She gripped his shirt in her hand just as desperately he did her waist.
“I need you home, Princess,” he uttered in such a tone that the hair on her neck raised.
“Why?”
“I’d like my heart returned to my chest, or at least near it,” he whispered. “Trying to function without it has been tormenting enough.”
She pressed her hand to his cheek and noticed the small smile on his lips. “Oh, you poor thing,” she mocked, feeling her own smile light up her cheeks.
He huffed amusedly under his breath, and he kissed her again, not as desperately this time, but still enough that made her heart flutter.
Air brushed between them when he pulled back, and she met his gaze with a heave of her chest. She wasn't sure how she was supposed to deny this. The realization that this might be the last she held him in her arms made a tear fall. His arm tightened around her, and he brushed the tear away.
"Don't give me that look," he whispered. "This is not the last I will see you."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're Nyssari Eaglefyre. And I won't let this be the last time. This isn't how this ends. I have entirely too many plans for us for this to be it."
