“From blood we are one,” she whispered finally.
“From blood we are one,” he repeated.
Candles flickered their soft amber light across his face, highlighting the sharp angles and features of his jaw. The ragged rise and fall of his chest matched her own. Here and now, they were one. As they would be until the end of time. Even death couldn’t fracture the bond now holding them together.
Somewhere in the heavens, a comet shot along the sky, propelled by flaming, glittering stardust. Its descent to the earth rumbled low in Tethys’s chest. He was hers, and she was his.
† † †
Sun beams filtered in from the crystal windows, sending rainbows dancing along the walls. Tethys welcomed the ache in her left palm as a reminder of the previous night. With her eyes still closed, she slid her hand across the mattress, expecting to find the solid warmth of her sleeping lieutenant.
The sheets were cold, however.
She jerked upright, her wild curls, still matted and unkempt, falling over her face. Araes’s bedchambers were silent, save for the roar of an impending rainstorm lurking over the seaside horizon. The packing table, once carrying the weight of his massive leather pack, was now vacant.
Her stomach roiled, and before she could register the utter heartbreak of Araes’s secret departure, she heaved over her bedside. Barely reaching the washroom in time, her stomach emptied in violent waves of sickness. With her body draped over the toilet, she expelled everything until nothing else could possibly remain. Her heart pounded in her head, as if its beat jostled the very brain matter residing there. She clung to the ceramic bowl and clawed her way back to standing.
The bedchamber remained empty when she finally found the strength to move. It was as if the room itself wiped every drop of Araes’s essence from its walls. She rubbed the scabbed-over slice across her palm, sending a jolting ache through her wrist. It was proof enough to stay grounded.
The vacancy was one like none she’d ever felt. She tucked back under the duvet and pulled it to her nose, breathing in his residual scent. Tethys never imagined a day when she’d have to say her goodbyes, but here it was. Some part of her was grateful he left without waking her. Watching him turn his back and walk through those doors would be agony unlike anything she’d felt before.
She sank into the mattress, letting the plush down curve around her body. In time, maybe she’d learn again to be alone. For now, however, she’d succumb to the loneliness, the frigid emptiness now hollowing her chest. Her hands traced the curve of her abdomen, resting just below her navel.
I will always find you.
She knew her lieutenant would, and now with the Elytheran bond tethering them together, she would always find him. She closed her eyes, expanding her mind until its boundaries widened outside of her body, the palace, the estate. It stretched further and further until it pinpointed a second heartbeat. One steady and laced with despair.
“I guess it’s just you and me now, little light,” she whispered. The tiny life tucked safely inside her body seemed to flutter in response. “We’ll be okay.”
She rolled to her side, pressing her face into a pillow now cold and forgotten beside her. His scent lingered on the cool silk, but it’d eventually fade. She prayed they’d betogether again before that day came.
Her fingers brushed against something beneath his pillow. A scroll of parchment intended as an offering to the Ostarian flames so many weeks ago. Tethys sucked in a breath as she unrolled the simple note. In crisp, neat handwriting was Araes’s secret kept.
I’ve loved her since the moment we met.
Chapter 63
Returning to his battalion didn’t feel like coming home. Araes was a stranger among not just the new no-ranks, but also the old friends he’d once called his brothers. Everything was different now. Perhaps his unit expected the ruthless, hardened lieutenant that’d left their ranks nearly a year ago, but he had changed, grown. The Venian air, once sweet with budding spring, burned his nostrils. The roar of the eastern river’s rapids, once cold and clean, was deafening in his ears.
In the month that passed since leaving his goddess, he’d sculpted himself back into the routines of war. Structure kept his thoughts from wandering to places too painful to bear.
Every morning he awoke before the sun to bathe and dress before morning formation. He ate the same oats and salted trout every breakfast service, and when his brothers cracked their usual jokes or told the tales Araes heard a thousand times before, he laughed.
He’d fallen into something far from human. He ate. Hebreathed. He slept. He trained. He didn’t think of the life they forced him to leave behind, or the blonde goddess miles away. He didn’t think about the new bond between them or the feel of her skin against his the last night they shared together.
The letters Tethys sent him, hand delivered by one of Ophis’s undercover shades, remained locked in the small steel box issued to him upon his return—for his important personal effects. Items so precious, they stayed locked away from prying fingers.
But maybe it wasn’t that he’d stowed them in that box beneath his rack for safekeeping. Maybe he’d kept them locked behind steel to protect himself. He read every one of her letters just once. Allowed the pain of their distance to well in his chest for a brief moment, only to bury it under the blanket of structured, mindless routine.
Araes shivered and pulled his cloak tighter. Gods, even with the moderate Venian climate, the midnight rain bit into every one of his bones.
“Fuck, I can’t wait to get out of these wet boots,” the soldier to his left said. Araes hadn’t yet learned the names of all the new faces in the 15th, some transfers from other units and some no-ranks rushed through basic training. Was his name Larken?
Araes couldn’t quite recall, but judging by how the boy wielded his blade in the training yard, he wouldn’t have to remember for long. The rebels, their new commanding officer had said, were ruthless, cutthroat killers. Even with activated forces from Ursae and Aquilae, their outpost barely held on by a thread. Larken wouldn’t stand a chance. He was a weak point, strung along on this godsforsaken recon mission to learn from more experienced soldiers.
“Quiet,” Araes hissed. “Haidee will have my balls if I have to explain to her it was your incessant complaints that gave our position away to these rebel scum. We’re allcold and miserable and soaked to the bone, but you don’t hear either of us griping about it.”
The no-rank snapped his mouth shut and locked his gaze forward, stifling shivers beneath a tunic that nearly drowned him.
