“A prisoner. A healer. A tool with a heartbeat.”
My knees buckled. The pain in my spine roared, bright and merciless, but I barely felt it. The echo of her words had gutted me.
Her hands found my face. They were rough—crusted with dried blood and grit—but they shook like she was afraid I might vanish.
“You’re bleeding,” she whispered. “Gods, Lazarus… what have they done to you?”
I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat—splinters of bone lodged where hope should have been.
So, I didn’t try.
I just held her.
For a fleeting moment, I let her warmth replace the cold.
For a heartbeat, I believed this place couldn’t touch us.
“Amara,” I rasped, her name cracking through the quiet. “My love… I entered the Shadow Lord Trials. I had no choice. I did it to win my freedom.”
We held each other as though the earth itself were falling away—two souls refusing to let the other disappear. My hands pressed against her back, feeling every breath, every heartbeat that proved she was still alive. Her arms looped around my ribs, fierce and unyielding, as if she could keep me from slipping back into the dark.
She drew away just enough to look at me. Her face was pale, hollowed by exhaustion, but her eyes still burned with that unrelenting light.
“Why would you do this?” she whispered, her voice shaking with fury and grief. “It’s all a game to them. Severen watches you suffer—and smiles.”
“It’s the only way, my love,” I said, brushing ash and tears from her cheeks with fingers split and raw. “I’ll survive this. I’ll win. And when I do, I’ll take you home. I’ll burn down whoever cast us into this hell.”
Her mouth parted, caught between protest and plea—but the words never came.
I kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t desperate. It was everything in between—need sharpened by pain, love frayed by survival. Our lips met like the clash of storm and flame. The world around us—stone, torchlight, smoke—ceased to exist. There was only the heat between us, the ragged edge of breath and the tremor beneath her skin.
Her body pressed against mine, trembling but alive, and her hands found my face as though afraid I might vanish. The kiss turned rougher, aching, desperate to prove we still existed. Her breath broke against my mouth, a shuddering mix of fury and longing. She tasted of salt, ash, and the sweetness of what we’d lost.
The kiss deepened, hungry and unhurried all at once—the kind that stole breath and time alike. It wasn’t lust; it was survival. A recognition older than words. The way the tide returned to the shore, again and again, even after centuries apart.
When we finally broke apart, our foreheads stayed pressed together, breaths mingling.
“If I die here,” I whispered, “at least my last breath will have touched yours.”
“Then don’t die,” she murmured. “Not while I’m still breathing.”
The words hung between us like an oath older than either of us, spoken not to the gods but to the dark that sought to claim us.
I traced her jaw with my thumb, memorizing her face in the wavering torchlight. She looked fragile and eternal, the last beautiful thing left in a ruined world.
For that fleeting moment, the prison felt less like a tomb and more like a heartbeat—one fragile, defiant pulse against the void.
We didn’t kiss to remember love.
We kissed because it was the only thing left that the darkness couldn’t take.
Then Amara’s eyes found mine. Smoke stung her lashes, but the flame in them didn’t waver.
“Lie down,” she said softly. “On your stomach.”
Her voice was steady, but her fingers trembled.
