“Come for me, Darling.”
His voice is little more than a rasped groan of pleasure, but his eyes never fall closed. He keeps them faithfully on me and consumes my every reaction, adjusting each thrust, each touch until I’m making noises I’ve never made. Until the only thing that matters is him,us.Niko pushes me closer and closer to the edge, a wave poised to overtake me entirely.
My eyes roll back as I buck my hips, meeting his hard thrust with one of my own, and my climax drowns me entirely. Power pulses from both of us, shimmering waves of death and life, as Niko slams up into me one last time, finding his own release with a guttural moan.
As my heartbeat slows, the dreamlight slowly sinks back into my skin and Niko’s ribbons slump to the ground around the piano. Still, he holds my gaze, his cheeks flushed and his mouth parted as he takes me in.
“I truly thought you’d leave,” he says softly, pushing my sweaty hair off my forehead, tracing my cheeks and lips and brows in soft circles. “That you’d leave me, and I’d spend eternity remembering what it felt like to—”
He cuts himself off, pressing his mouth into a thin line.
My heart stutters in my chest as he drops his gaze for the first time. I study the thick fan of his lashes over his cheekbones, my heart feeling like it’s made of glass. Like I’ve filled it with too much, and one crack will send it shattering to pieces.
“Felt like to what, Niko?”
After a moment, he returns his eyes to mine.
“To be known by someone like you. To know the feeling of your heart beating next to mine—unmasked, unarmored—only as they are. Broken, scarred, dark.” His hands run softly over my face. “I know what it costs you to trust, Willa. What it means for you to remove your armor. To stay still and be vulnerable.”
He brushes his lips softly over my forehead. “I fooled myself into hating your self-preservation, when really, it was that I’d never be worthy of the strength of your fight.”
“Niko—”
He kisses me again, before resting his forehead against mine. “All this time I thought I was praying to the star above. But I’ve been praying to you.”
Niko’s gaze is fierce, but his touch is gentle as he presses a hand to my chest. My heart leaps like it’s straining toward his fingers. “The world could burn, and the heavens could turn to dust. But you and I endure, Willa. This…this is eternal.”
When he kisses me, his lips are softer, but no less demanding. And I return it with the same passion, slowly tasting him, feeling his words in the depths of my bones. In the heat of my blood, and the make of my skin. Everlasting, abiding. What exists between Niko and I is not fated by the stars, or some long lost god—it’s eternal becausewe’vedecided it is.
And in this moment, I realize: love doesn’t reside in your heart. It lives in your jugular vein, mingles with your blood. A heart, even a glass one, can survive being shattered, but one nick of that vein, and everything inside you pours out. And if there’s no one there to staunch the wound, you’ll be left with nothing.
A few months ago, that would have terrified me, but with the King of Carrion—his violence, his power, his obsessive care—for the first time in over a century, I know my eternal life is in safe hands.
Chapter thirty-eight
Despite the chill of the morning air, sweat beads along Willa’s forehead, plastering thick tendrils of her hair to her skin.
“I think I’ve had one too many of the Lunaedon’s donuts,” she exclaims breathlessly, to my amusement. “Are we almost there?”
“Only a few more minutes,” I assure her.
My breathing is far more labored than hers, and my tongue feels like cotton in my mouth, but I forge forward through the overgrown foliage, determined to make it to our destination despite my body’s protestations.
The will-o-wisps hum in the branches above us, and the winter wind teases the hem of my cloak, as I slice through a particularly thick bramble. Though the flurry of air is gentle, the words drifting through it are not.
Time rushes on. Time rushes on.
They dig into my skin more surely than my death, an icy echo of my own fears. I’ve been mired in place for so long, now that the world has begun to move again, the velocity is terrifying. I’d forgotten what it is to age—forgotten how it is to desperatelywish to stay in a moment forever and have it slip from your grasp anyway, lost in the blurred ocean of memories. I’d forgotten the way time pulls taut with dread and races forward with love, and though I’m thankful for every moment with Willa I’m granted, there exists a bitter part of me that is terrified it won’t be enough.
That there will never be enough of anything when it comes to Willa.
“Keeping me up all night and then waking me up at the crack of dawn to hike up a mountain…you better have alcohol in that bag of yours.”
“It’s 7 in the morning,” I reply with a laugh.
“I’m immortal. Time is a construct that means nothing to me.” She wiggles her eyebrows in challenge. “Unless getting liquored up and debauching me in the woods is too unseemly for His Royal Highness.”
Her mouth wraps around the title in a taunting drawl that immediately heats my blood. “You forget…I was a pirate in a former life, Darling.” I pull a bottle of rum from my bag, jostling it at her. “How is it that I had you on your knees in the middle of the forest, and youstillunderestimate my penchant for debauchery?”
