She huffs, the sound softer this time, almost pained. “That’s not your call to make, Rock Boy.”
Gods.
I catch her hand before she can pull away, curling my fingers around hers, and bring her knuckles to my lips.
The same small, reverent kiss I gave her the first night I called her Oona.
My Oona.
“I do not want you in the path of this,” I tell her, forcing her to see it in my eyes. The fear. The resolve. All of it. “Not yet. Not when Idris is playing with forces even I cannot predict.”
“So I stay,” she says slowly. “Here. With Alaric, Jules, Phoebe, Delia. In your fortress with the grumpy roots and the smug walls that keep rearranging doorways when they think I need a shortcut.”
“Yes.” A corner of my mouth lifts despite the dread coiling in my gut. “The Barrow has adopted you. It will fight for you.”
“Good.” Her jaw tightens. “Because if it lets something happen to me, I’m haunting it for eternity.”
“I will chisel that into the foundation as a threat,” I promise.
Her smile fades. Her eyes go dark and bright all at once.
“It’s too soon for me to feel like my heart will break if I lose you,” she whispers.
The words are blade-sharp and trembling, and they cut clean through the armor I’ve worn since Aurel fell.
“But I do feel that way. And I hate it. And I… I don’t want to pretend I don’t.”
“You never have to pretend with me,” I tell her.
That deep, grinding pressure in my chest tightens.
The same dread. The same wild, unfamiliar hope.
“I will come back to you, Oona,” I vow. The Marches hum under my feet, sealing it. “On my soul, on my land. I will come back.”
“You better,” she says, but her voice cracks on the last word.
She rises onto her toes, fingers curling into the front of my tunic like she’s anchoring herself, and drags me down into a kiss.
It is not chaste.
It is not careful.
It is desperate and fierce and real, our mouths crashing together with all the things we do not have time to say.
She tastes faintly of the fyrran she drank this morning, and more strongly of sweet stubbornness and something else I am terrified to name.
The bond surges—no, it slams—through me like a tectonic shift, like plates grinding and locking into a new shape that can never go back to what it was before.
I kiss her back like a dying man fighting for breath, one hand cradling the back of her neck, the other splayed over her spine, memorizing the exact curve of her, the exact heat.
If stone could pray, this is what it would feel like.
When she finally pulls away, we’re both breathing harder.
Her eyes are bright. No tears. Just that stubborn, unshakeable fire.
“I’ll see you later, viyen,” she whispers. “That’s not a request. That’s an order.”
