The static I had sensed earlier? The clouding of her future? As our connection deepened, shifting from medical to metaphysical, I touched the edge of it.
All I could tell was that it wasn't natural. It wasn't trauma. It was a wall.
Someone had placed a veil over her timeline. A powerful, deliberate obfuscation. It felt cold. It felt like... crossroads.
The idea made a name want to surface in my mind, unbidden, a ghost from a history lesson I dimly recalled. But the more I reached for it, the more I lost my grasp on it, like sand sifting through my fingers.
I tried to pull back, to analyze the anomaly, but Aria made a sound, a soft, desperate whimper in the back of her throat, and her fingers tightened on my wrists, sliding up to tangle in the hair at the nape of my neck.
She opened her mouth, deepening the kiss, and logic evaporated.
The analytical distance I prided myself on shattered. The observer became the participant.
I wasn't healing her anymore. I was drowning in her.
The kiss evolved, shifting from a transfer of energy to a collision of souls. I felt her hunger, sharp and surprising. It wasn't just physical; she was starving for contact, for proof of existence. And I was a man who had lived in the abstract for aeons. I had watched life from a distance.
Touching her, tasting her, feeling the frantic beat of her heart against my chest... it was the most real thing I had ever experienced.
My hands slid from her face to her waist, pulling her off the stone floor and into my lap. She went willingly, straddling me, her body pressing against mine with feverish urgency. The wool of our stolen clothes was a barrier I desperately wanted to burn away.
"Aria," I gasped, breaking the kiss to breathe, my forehead resting against hers. My vision was swimming; the future fracturing into a billion kaleidoscope shards of her. "You are... overwhelming."
"Don't stop," she whispered, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands clutching my shoulders. "Please. It makes the noise stop."
"What noise?"
"The fear," she said. "The doubt. When you touch me, I just feel you."
My heart, that ancient, forged thing in my chest, skipped a beat.
I kissed her again, and this time, I didn't hold back the phoenix. I let the fire rise to the surface of my skin, warming us, wrapping us in a cocoon of thermal energy. I let her taste the ashes of the worlds I had seen die, and the sparks of the stars I wanted to place at her feet.
We were lost in the friction, in the heat, in the desperate, clawing need to be close. For a moment, I forgot the cavern, I forgot the Devourer, and I forgot the lie I had told Kaelen.
I didn't hear the footsteps returning from the tunnel.
"Well," Flynn’s voice cut through the haze, dry and laced with a dangerous amusement. "I guess she wasn't that hungry."
Aria jolted in my arms, her eyes snapping open.
I looked up, breathless, my lips swollen and tingling.
Flynn stood at the edge of the firelight, a string of pale, eyeless fish in one hand. Beside him, Kaelen stood frozen, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword so hard the leather groaned.
The Dragon Prince’s eyes were burning gold, and the look on his face wasn't amusement. It was devastation.
"Is the healing finished?" Kaelen asked, his voice dead flat.
I looked at Aria, flushed and trembling in my lap, her lips red from my own. I felt the connection between us, a new, vibrant golden thread humming in the air.
"No," I said, meeting my brother's gaze. "I think it has only just begun."
But as I looked at Kaelen, I saw a question in his eyes that terrified me more than any prophecy.
If she chooses you, his gaze seemed to ask, what is left for me?
EIGHTEEN
