I slowed my breaths, and my heart steadied with it. A sensation that had been dull before now sharpened at my back. “A sharp rock.” I shifted to get away from it and realized what the weight on my legs was. What I’d grabbed when I couldn’t see.
Clarissa was straddling me on the cave floor, two thighs wrapped around my waist with her chest mere inches from mine. My hands rested on her lower back. My fingers had crawled up the fabric of her tight shirt, her smooth skin hot beneath my fingertips. Without knowing what I was doing, I trailed my hands around her waist, and she let out a gasp when they skimmed over her stomach.
My panic began to slip, only for something else to take its place. Something just as unsteady, just as uncontrollable. Onehand squeezed her waist while the other traced a path to the top of her thigh and gripped it tightly.
“I feelyou,” I breathed out, pulling her closer, pressing into her. She was all I could feel, all I could see, all I could think about as I tried to force away the fear.
I thought she was going to push me off. She’d been ignoring me for days, ever since what happened at the bonfire, and I couldn’t blame her.
But she didn’t.
She melted into me. A sob broke free as she buried her face in my neck. Her body shook with small tremors, and I held her against me as I guided us to a seated position against the stones.
“You scared me,” she said on an exhale. Her breath hovered at my neck, sending a shiver through my body and making my fingers clench around her legs. “I thought…you weren’t breathing, and then you fell, and I couldn’t get you to… I didn’t know what to do.”
“I’m fine, Empress,” I said hoarsely. “I’m with you. Don’t be scared.”
She pulled back an inch, still close enough that I could see a tear lining her eye. When she blinked, it fell from her lashes and rolled down her cheek.
“I’m always scared,” she whispered.
I didn’t think. I pressed my lips to that tear, its salty taste bursting on my tongue.
Fates, she felt good. Her legs wrapped around me, my hands covering her back, our chests pushing together with each shared breath. I let my lips linger on her cheek, then the column of her throat, inhaling her scent like I could draw her into me. Like I could keep her golden light with me wherever I went.
She made everything brighter. She took away the gray.
When she let out a small moan and tilted her neck to the side, I nearly lost my mind.
I placed another kiss on her throat, murmuring her name against her skin. A small part of me knew I shouldn’t be doing this. There was a reason this was wrong, a reason this felt like temptationand pain all in one. But I couldn’t remember the last time I felt soright.
The sound of rocks shifting above us caught our attention. Clarissa’s face snapped up, and her body tightened as she started to move away from me.
I pulled her closer. Ineededher. She was the thing that kept me grounded. The pulse in her throat beat to mine, steady and sure and safe. “Please, Clarissa,” I begged, sliding one hand up her back and the other gripping her thigh hard enough to leave a mark.
“It could be someone trying to get through.” Even as she said the words, she sank back onto me, as if she was also caught in whatever haze I was in. Like a string tied her to me, and we couldn’t rip ourselves from it even if we wanted to.
“I don’t care.”
“Thorne, it could be Marigold.”
The string snapped.Marigold.
Her name pulled me back to reality. I nodded and dropped my arms, and we both scrambled from the ground.
“Clarissa! Thorne! Are you there? Are you alright?” Galen’s muffled voice sounded from the top of the rock pile. If I squinted, I could see a small hole someone had cleared away, enough to let us hear through to the other side.
“We’re fine!” I shouted. “How are you? Where’s Marigold?”
“She’s safe,” he responded, and my shoulders dropped in relief as my head rolled onto my chest. “She and your mother went back to the entrance. They’ve got some miners here with equipment to get you two out, don’t worry. It shouldn’t take long. Shout if you need anything.”
Clarissa’s hands were steepled in front of her face. I instinctively reached for her and pulled her into my side. “We’re going to be fine,” I said into her hair, more to reassure myself than her. “They’re all safe.”
When she pushed away from me, I knew the moment had burst. This fragile bubble we’d found ourselves in, where theoutside world didn’t exist, where for a single heartbeat, she was mine.
It was gone.
“Thorne, we—we can’t,” she said quietly. She crossed her arms over her chest as if trying to make herself smaller as she took several steps back.
