In herself.
“Are you sure I’m what you want?” she asks quietly. Then, softer still, like the question is the real wound. “What Nightfall wants?”
The words hit like a stone thrown into still water—ripples spreading fast, deep.
Because I know what it is to wonder if you are wanted.
To serve a realm that needs you and still feel like you are tolerated. Feared. Used.
I lift our joined hands and press her knuckles to my mouth.
Once. Twice. A vow in the simplest language I have.
“How can you even doubt, Oona?” My voice comes rough, the storm edge slipping free.
I slide my other hand to her jaw, thumb brushing her cheekbone, anchoring her where she stands. “You are the savior of my soul.”
Her breath catches.
I lean closer until our foreheads touch, until she can feel the truth in my body—the steady, relentless beat of my heart against hers.
“The foundation of my heart,” I continue, each word carved from something that used to be locked behind stone. “When you came to me, the earth went… quiet. For the first time since Aurel fell, the Marches stopped screaming in my bones.”
Her eyes shine under the moonlight—green-gold reflected in dark brown, like soil taking sunlight.
“I cannot live without you,” I say, and there’s no dramatics in it. No poetry. Just the plain, brutal truth. “Not because the realm requires it. Not because the Crown demanded it.”
I tighten my hold on her hand, interlacing us more firmly, as if anything could pry her loose.
“Because I do.”
For a second she just stares at me like she’s trying to decide whether to laugh or cry—or hit me for being so devastatingly sincere.
Then her mouth wobbles.
And she does what she always does when emotion gets too sharp.
She swings for humor.
“Wow,” she says, blinking fast, voice going dry. “You really have a way with words for a guy who plays with rocks and mud all day.”
A sound escapes me—half a scoff, half a rough laugh.
“Rocks,” I correct gravely. “Stone. There is a difference.”
She snorts, and the last of that tightness breaks.
Her shoulders loosen.
Her breath steadies.
Like the ground inside her finally believes it’s allowed to hold.
“And mud?” she challenges.
I glance down at her—this mortal woman with a spine of iron and a mouth that could start wars—and let my thumb trace the soft corner of her lips.
“Mud,” I admit, “is simply earth that has been kissed by water.”
