Love.
The word paralyzes me, skeletal fingers digging into the wood of the vanity frame until it groans under the pressure. How did this happen? When did it start? Weeks ago? Days?
My mind races backward.
Seeking the infection point.
Was it in the grave? In that silent truce when we watched the fog side by side, that rare peacefulness between us so narcotic to my senses, I wanted to soak in it for hours.
Or was it in the tower? When I held her after lust and curiosity were equally sated, and still, I pulled her body deeply into mine. Skin against skin, secretly wishing the sun would stop rising so I wouldn’t have to let her go.
Or does this go further back still?
Kael comes to mind. Or rather, the many times his name left Elara’s mouth.Kael is opening up to me. At least he has a heart. He had me on the table by the hearth…Filthy hands everywhere, ready to melt himself intomywife as if?—
I stutter out a breath, the mere thought of that boy scratching at my insides like a rusted blade. Disdain for his righteousness, his daring, his constant defiance over the years, I told myself. Now I see the ugliness for what it was.
Blistering, possessive jealousy.
I stare at the red thread in the mirror, the cloak of denial thinning more with each of my heart’s throbs. I should have known. The library. The sudden constriction in my chest when I foolishly kissed her. The chapel. The tingle beneath my ribs when I spoke those rotten vows. Those weren’t aches of old injury, but symptoms of an emotion long, long forgotten.
I’m falling in love with Elara.
Or perhaps…I already have.
I look at the single healed string, thick and robust, stomach turning more the longer I stare. This intense longing, thisterrifying yearning, this ache that feels like my ribs are being pried apart…all fromonestring? One?
Panic, cold and sharp, spikes in my gut. If a single healed thread can reduce a god to a jealous, pining fool, what would happen with two?
I don’t want to find out.
Tugging my cloak back to cover my bones, I turn away from the mirror and toward the littered desk. Elara sits there, slumped over scrolls, her head resting on a stack of open books while her brown hair spills over a mouth slightly parted as she breathes.
Her posture is going to punish her in the morning. Stiff neck. Shooting pains. Mortal nonsense that is of no consequence to me.
And yet, I’m already moving.
I slide an arm beneath Elara’s knees and another around her back, lifting her carefully so as not to wake her. Any mortal would at Death’s touch. My presence alone is something they often sense. Hairs rising on their arms. Sudden chill in the air. Stomach dropping. That instinctual glance back over their shoulder as if they noticed me watching.
But my wife? Oh, she sleeps on.
It annoys me, how safe she feels. As if her life spent digging graves has made her undisturbed by the god who fills them. She exhales softly, curling into me, her hand bunching my cloak in a loose, trusting grip.
My breath catches at the domesticity of it, making room in my chest for the tugging, the twisting, the pinching. My second heartstring, no doubt, frayed ends straining to mend back together in this very moment.
If I were wise, I would drop her.
Instead, I carry her the short distance to the bed like the immortal fool I am for this woman. But when I lay her down on sheets, still warm from the hearth, her arm refuses to lower.
My gaze drops to those little fingers hooked into my cloak, exposing a handful of alabaster ribs. The memory of the woods assaults me, not as a visual, but as blood rushing to my crotch, hot and heady.
I expected her to scream. When I stepped into the moonlight and revealed what most mortals consider grotesque, I braced for the retching, the flinching, the terror.
Ahh…flinch, she did.
But only once before she touched me, little fingers tracing torn skin, gliding along bone, slipping past tendons. She touched methere, too, little hand wrapped around my cock, exploring with the same curiosity she used on my ribcage and skull.
No recoil. No disgust.
