Willa is the true Queen of Dreams. Vibrant, vicious, and beautiful. That she would deign to be marked permanently by me—deign to stain her perfect skin with the touch of death—humbles me in a way I’ve never been before. So many cower in the face of death, unable to meet the eyes of their end, but Willa—Willa embraces everything I am. The darkness, the silence, the anger, the relief, the comfort.
She wants all of it.
Her hands go to my hair, her fingers stroking gently until the wave recedes and I’m able to form words.
“Are you sure?”
I don’t want to ask the question—Iwantto pin her to the bed and tattoo every bit of her skin so everyone in this world and the next knows who she belongs to—but a vulnerable part of me fears I’ve dreamed this up. Like it isn’t tangible, all feverish colors and blurred lines, too good to be true. Too beautiful to be real.
Willa hooks her fingers beneath my chin. A shiver runs through me at her touch as she pulls my gaze to hers.
“I told you I’ve spent my life in unscathed skin. Nothing in my entire existence has ever left behind anything more than a distant echo. But maybe…maybe it isn’t the curse I thought it was. Maybe it’s a blessing, to only be marked by the deepest things. Thetruestthings.”
The greens and golds of her irises shine behind a sheen of unshed tears, and I feel the echo of them in my soul.
“That is you, Niko. In every life time.” She leans in, the words whispering over my lips like the most sacred of invocations. “Ruin me.”
It feels like a lifetime has passed since Willa first spoke those same words to me on the roof of the Lunaedon. When I’d been ready to sacrifice my kingdom and the mainland beyond it, if only for the chance to give her what she wanted.
We have been torn apart by our circumstances, by our fears, by our hopes, but it is those same things that gave us the strength to fight our way back to each other; the same things that remind us each day how precious what exists between us is. Willa is threaded through my bones, embedded in my lungs, burrowed into each beat of my heart. She has changed the very rhythms of my body, both a fated inevitability and a daily choice.
I do as she asks. I pull her to me and ruin her entirely.
I mark her skin with my teeth, mold her body beneath my hands. I fill her and stretch her until her sounds are a sonance that is only ours. Uniquely entwined music, branded by our shared beauty, edged by our shared pain.
And when she shatters apart beneath me, I feel like I could touch each of the pieces—that every one of them embeds beneath my skin, branding me in return.
After, I lay her out on her stomach, and dip the tattoo gun into the first pot of ink.
“For a woman who doesn’t trust anyone, it’s awfully trusting of you to assume I can draw. What if I’m terrible, and tattoo stick figures all over you?”
“What kind of stick figures?” Willa hums in amusement. “Dirty ones, I hope.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re incorrigible.”
“A menace to society, remember?” she laughs, before settling into the bed with a satisfied sigh that lights my blood on fire all over again. “I saw your maps on the Indomnitus…and I knew without even looking at the signature they were yours.”
I trace my fingers over the curve of her spine, imagining a new sort of map—one of us.
“They felt like you, because only you could make something as utilitarian as a map into something so beautiful,” she continues, even as she stills beneath my touch.
“I think there’s room for art in most things if you know where to look.”
I press the needle to her skin and begin a small line. The air seems to pull taut in anticipation, like Willa and I and perhaps the Lunaedon itself all hold our breath, waiting to see if the ink will disappear. When it doesn’t, the mark still crisp and dark on the tanned skin of her back, our gaze locks. And when I giveher an affirming nod, I’m struck dumb by the brilliance of her returning smile.
Like being marked by me eternally is the highest honor, when really, it is the other way around.
Willa breathes out slowly as I begin to work in the ink, the design taking a clearer shape in my mind.
“Tell me about them,” she orders. “The maps.”
I oblige. “I started drawing them as a Strayed. To escape the horror beneath the Hollows, I explored every inch of the island, and always sketched what I found. Maybe it was a way to feel connected to a world I could never touch. Or maybe it was simply the motion that calmed my mind. Whatever it was, it became a habit by the time Sam and I left. I drew every world we found, every shore we explored so I could remember the details of each one.”
“I’m sorry you lost them all,” she says softly, her gaze drifting to where Celie’s bracelet is fastened around her wrist. Like Willa believes I’d been forced into a choice between her happiness and my own, when there was no choice at all.
“It’s my own fault. I had over two hundred years to bring them to the Lunaedon, and I never did. I left them to gather dust in the bowels of the Crocodile along with everything else that reminded me of the freedom I once had. The freedom I gave away with my arrogance.”
Willa grows quiet, and for a few long moments, the only sound is the soft buzz of the needle.
