Ash stayed silent. Waited.
“One moment I was fighting Malcarion’s rebels; the next, an arrow struck my spine.” His words were stripped of emotion, and Ash shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself as he spoke. “I woke in darkness, my wrists, ankles, chest, and throat locked in molten void-iron. Null-sigils burned the power from me. Every breath felt like fire poured into my bones…”
His steps slowed, his voice flat. “The demon-wraiths whispered the horrors they would carry out…then did them, until my mind bled. When that didn’t break me, they left me in a stone box so small I couldn’t even stand.”
Her stomach twisted, each reveal scraping her raw, and her eyes burned. Still, she kept silent because he needed to speak—and she needed to hear it.
He told her of an agony that never allowed him an escape into oblivion. “Every breath was a torture as I burned from the sigils, inside and out. Centuries of that brutality and being bent double in a stone box, I wasslowly going mad in the dark…”
Ash swallowed hard, throat locked with unshed tears.
“Kaelthar, my dragon, was dying. I was no better, could barely speak, so I reached for him mentally…” He stopped in the middle of the room, staring at nothing, every line of his face carved in anguish.
“You call your dragon, Kaelthar?” she asked softly.
He nodded. “Naming him was instinct. Survival. I didn’t feel so…alone.” His fingers curled against his thigh. “I had to keep talking to him—remind him we were still one. If he died…” his throat worked, “I would have gone insane.”
Her arms ached from holding herself so tightly, but it was nothing compared to the anguish ripping through her when another truth struck like a gut punch. “Is that why you prefer the outdoors—and those enormous caves—to being inside a building? And why you immediately opened the window the moment we came in?”
He sank onto the bench once more, hunched over, and scrubbed his face. “Aye,” he said, voice rough. “As long as I can see the stars.”
Her heart simply broke. Tears blurred her eyes.
No words could make right what he’d suffered. So, Ash did the only thing she could. She slipped between his thighs and wrapped her arms around him, offering him comfort.
For a heartbeat, he didn’t move. Then his arms locked around her, his face pressed to her sternum as if he needed her heartbeat to anchor him—to breathe.
This was why he hid behind sarcasm and wielded humor like a blade. It was all a mask to cover the horror he’d endured.
She rested her cheek on his hair, the tears dripping. “You kept your dragon alive,” she choked. “You kept yourself alive. That’s strength, Race.”
He drew back, his thumb brushing the wetness on her cheek as if surprised. “You cry forme?”
With a trembling hand, she brushed back a silver strip of hair that had escaped his loosely braided mane, then trailed her fingertips over the black streaks woven in the front.“No one deserves the horror you suffered.If I could, I’d kill Malcarion.”
“No!” A growl erupted. “I don’t want you in his sights.”
Ash patted his back, understanding the fear beneath his fury. She crossed to the washstand, splashed icy water from the jug into a tin mug, drank, then pressed the chilled metal to her hot cheeks, trying to calm the fire in her blood. “How did you escape Tartarus?”
“Still a mystery.” He shrugged. “In that half-mad state, I remember the ground shaking, the wards dying, the cell doors flying open. Then a force unlike any I’d ever known hauled me through the darkness and into sunlight.”
She took another sip of water. “Who freed you?”
He lifted a shoulder. “No idea. Perhaps Michael? Never asked, didn’t care, as long as I was free.”
Setting the mug down, Ash crossed to him, pushed his cloak aside and sat next to him, resting her cheek against the solid warmth of his biceps.
He scooped her up onto his lap and just held her.
Ash tenderly caressed the sculpted lines of his jaw, needing the contact. Despite everything he endured, he still carried an air of effortless magnetism—otherworldly and beautiful. Or perhaps it was her own growing emotions that made her see him that way.
“You look at me like that,” he rumbled, “and all I can think of is kissing you again—putting my mouth anywhere you’d let me. Hell, you just have to be near me for me to want you.”
She huffed. “It goes both ways, you know?”
“Indeed.” He trailed kisses along her jaw and finally claimed her mouth, slow at first, tasting, then sucking her lower lip?—
“Race, wait, wait.” She pulled back.
