Her laugh made the lantern light gutter, then go out. An abrupt darkness fell over them. Séverin was quiet for a moment, and then his voice found her in the shadows. He had moved closer. “There’sno need to beg for something I’d give without question. Is that what you want from me, Laila?”
Laila might not have heard the siren song in the cave, but her blood answered to a different call. The thrum of memory filled her—his mouth on her skin, her name on his lips.
The world told her she was a thousand things—a girl sculpted from grave dirt, a snow maiden flirting with spring’s thaw, an exotic phantasm for men to pin their lusts upon just to keep her in place.
But with Séverin, she was always Laila.
The wet ground squelched underfoot. He had stepped toward her, closing the distance between them even more. Even in the dark, she could tell Séverin was standing utterly still.
For once, he was the one waiting, and Laila savored it for only a breath before she reached out, touching his face. Séverin groaned, whatever stillness he had mastered vanishing the second she touched him. The lantern crashed to the ground, and he crushed her to him in a kiss.
Laila thought often of what it meant to be lost in a kiss. The sensation so heady and drowning that the world beyond it ceased to exist. But in this kiss, Laila was not lost, but found. Her senses turned diamond-sharp, her body felt like a column of flame greedily devouring every scent, texture, taste it could find as he pushed her up against the wall.
“Are you all right?” shouted Enrique. “What was that sound?”
Laila wrenched away. There was a pause, a soft sigh, and then—
“We’re fine,” called Séverin, out of breath. “I dropped the lantern.”
There was a familiarripof the match as Séverin relit the dead wick. Light flared between them, and with it, the too-bright knowledge of what a selfish mistake she’d committed. She looked up at Séverin, ready to apologize, but the sight of him stopped her short.Séverin’s violet eyes might have been the precise color of sleep, but his gaze was restless and alive, fever-bright with longing. For her.
It was too much. All the bruises he’d left on her heart made it too tender to hold that gaze, and so she said the first thing that came to her mind.
“Thank you.”
Séverin closed his eyes, and immediately Laila knew she’d said the wrong thing. “Please don’t thank me for something I already wanted to give.”
“I… I have nothing else to offer.”
“So you’ve said.” He turned away from her, his hand on the wall, his head bowed as if he wished to rest his forehead on the rock. “Did I at least make you feel alive, Laila?”
Laila nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her. “Yes.”
But he made her feel other things too, and the sensation on her heart felt like air blown across a new wound. The only thing that would heal it was time, a commodity she barely had left.
“Then for that I’m glad,” he said.
He took a deep breath, sighing. The moment he pushed himself off the rock, amber light flared over the stone. The sudden light was like a window abruptly revealed by the parting of drapes.
Laila gasped, and Séverin raised his head just in time to see the flash of sudden radiance. It bloomed right where his hand touched the wall, expanding to the size of a large dinner platter.
A second later, Séverin’s hand melted through the rock. Jeweled light limned his submerged wrist just long enough for Laila to glimpse a corner of what lay inside—
Carved walls, hundreds of stone steps disappearing out of sight, massive bronze hands. A floor that looked like the vaulted skies of heaven, and a ceiling rich and green as Eden.
But no sooner had she glimpsed it than the image faded.
Translucence there and gone.
Not far off, Laila heard the others call out, racing back as the amber light dwindled and began to fall in on itself. Séverin snatched his hand away just in time for the rough obsidian wall to close up, fast as a blink.
Enrique, Hypnos, and Zofia arrived, breathless, at their side.
“How did you do that?” asked Enrique.
Séverin’s eyes found Laila’s in the gloaming. “I have no idea.”
28
