“Are we floating in the middle of the Radel Sea? And the Jofryo River is…what, no longer a river in this area?”
He nodded.
She inhaled deeply. “But you’re alive, the Bird is dead, and there is only one piece left of the heart of the Queen to destroy.”
“Which is inside her very own chest,” he added.
She lifted her eyebrows. Of course, it was there. “So happy bloody days.”
“Happy bloody days indeed, my sweet fire.”
He kissed her, their lips savoring each other while their hands roamed each other’s bodies.
He kissed her once more, not with hunger but with a gentleness that stole the air from her lungs. It was a kiss of homecoming, of recognition, of everything they had lost and somehow found again. When he drew back, his silver eyes held her so tightly she felt her pulse steady under them.
“I almost lost you,” she whispered.
“And I almost stayed gone,” he admitted. His hand cupped her face, thumb brushing the trail of dried tears. “But you didn’t let me. You never let me. My stubborn woman.”
Her laugh broke into a sob, rough and small. “And here you are, so it was all worth it.”
“Yours,” he said, as if there had never been another answer. “I’m here, and I’m yours, Lenna. Through fire, through death, through whatever else this world throws at us. You’re the one. You’ve always been the one.”
Her chest cracked with the force of the unbearable simplicity. She pressed her forehead against his, eyes closed, letting the truth of him sink into her bones. His arms wrapped her close, and for the first time in months, maybe years, she allowed herself to believe in protection and unity.
Jake inhaled deeply, his chest expanding against her cheek, and they moved enough to look at each other. He held his palm up, facing her, and when she felt the meaning of his gesture, her breath held, but not a cell in her body had any trace of doubt. Trying her best not to jump with uncontained joy and kick the man in the face by accident, she kept her very excited ass still and placed her shaking fingers against his, their palms touching vertically.
“We,” she breathed, testing the word, tasting it, as she let her golden sparks travel to his thumb, circling it, injecting her magicinto his skin in the shape of a golden-ink ring. “We will rebuild. We will fight. We will live. I’m only yours and will forever be.”
“We,” he echoed, sealing his acquired golden ring with a small, perpendicular navy line. Then his navy sparks traveled to her thumb and circled it in a finer line. “I’m only yours and will forever be.”
“You’re my man, Jake Coralt,” Lenna claimed, adding a small golden line across the navy ring to seal it permanently in an unbreakable oath.
“You’re my woman, Lenna Brachyan.”
Silence folded around them, not empty but vast, the kind of silence that carried oaths, that trespassed magic and centuries. There was no fear. Only certainty.
They sealed their love with a kiss that knew no boundaries, no limits, nothing but a forevermore.
“Can we still moure to the other Petals and the Core?” she asked quietly, because even in love, war did not pause.
Jake gave a crooked smile. “Good a time as any to test. Especially with everyone at Corentre’s safehouse no doubt busy preparing for a Queen we have to kill.”
Her laugh was short but real. She pressed her cheek against his chest, listening to the steady beat beneath. The sound anchored her, rooted her, reminded her they were alive, together, and ready.
Whatever storms awaited, they would meet them as one.
39
Ayla
Ayla felt Raoul leaning on the kitchen counter in the Crystal Clear Safehouse before she even heard him, and that was saying something.
His silence, as usual, didn’t last long.
“And on today’s chapter ofI Love Her But It’s A Secret, please welcome Ayla the Chef, in her noble duty of peeling onions instead of confessing her undying love to the woman she sleeps six inches away from.”
“Have I told you that you have more energy than most living beings?” she muttered.
