He kisses me then—soft, trembling, nothing like the desperate claiming of the heat. This is something else. Something new.
Something that might be the beginning of everything.
When we break apart, the whole common room is staring at us. I’d forgotten they were there.
“Take me somewhere private,” I say. “We have a lot to figure out.”
He doesn’t need to be told twice.Chapter 26: Karax
She chose me.
The reality of it doesn’t sink in immediately. I hold her in my arms—this fierce, impossible woman who should hate me, who has every right to hate me—and I wait for her to changeher mind. Wait for her to realize that keeping the crystal was a mistake, that she could still use it, that walking away would be the sane choice.
She doesn’t walk away.
Instead, she looks up at me with those gray eyes and says, “Take me somewhere private. We have a lot to figure out.”
The inn doesn’t have rooms large enough for an eight-foot Fae lord, but it has a barn. We spread blankets on the hay, and I laugh at the absurdity of it—the Guardian of Stone Court, about to claim his omega in a human stable.
“What’s funny?” she asks, pulling off her boots.
“Nothing.” I reach for her, drawing her against my chest. “Everything. I never imagined this moment happening in a barn.”
“Life is full of surprises.” She rises on her toes and kisses me, and all the laughter dies in my throat.
This is different from the claiming during her heat.
There’s no biological imperative driving us, no desperate need burning through her blood. She’s here because shechoseto be. Because she looked at everything I did—all the manipulation, all the isolation, all the manufactured desperation—and decided to stay anyway.
I don’t deserve it.
I’m going to spend the rest of my existence trying to.
I undress her slowly, reverently, pressing kisses to every inch of skin I reveal.
Her shirt first—unlacing it with fingers that tremble despite seven centuries of steadiness. The fabric falls away and I pressmy lips to her collarbone, feeling her pulse flutter beneath my mouth. She shivers, and I feel the echo of it through the bond. Not fear. Anticipation.
“You’re shaking,” she murmurs.
“I know.” I don’t try to hide it. “I’ve spent seven hundred years being certain of everything. Right now I’m not certain of anything except that I don’t want to wake up and find this was a dream.”
She takes my face in her hands and pulls me down to her level. “It’s not a dream. I’m here. I chose this.”
I kiss her again, deeper this time, and my hands find the laces of her trousers.
The leather slides down her hips and I follow it with my mouth—kissing her stomach, her hip bones, the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. She’s trembling now too, her fingers tangled in my hair, her breath coming in short gasps.
“Karax—”
“Let me.” I look up at her, meeting her eyes over the landscape of her body. She’s still too thin from the bond sickness, still gaunt and hollow in ways that make my chest ache with guilt. But she’s beautiful like this—flushed and wanting, spread out before me on rough wool blankets in a hay-filled barn. “Let me show you what this means to me.”
I settle between her thighs and breathe her in. Her scent is different now—still sweet omega arousal, the slick already beginning to coat her folds, but layered with something else. Something that smells like choice. Like freedom.
Like the beginning of something I don’t have words for.
I lick into her slowly, deliberately, and she cries out—her hips jerking, her hands fisting in my hair. I pin her down with one arm across her stomach, holding her still while I explore her with my tongue.
“Oh god—” Her voice breaks. “Karax, please—”
