Then his lashes lift.
Green eyes, hazy with sleep, blink once. Twice. Settling on my face with the dazed, disoriented wonder of a man surfacing from a dream he didn’t expect to have.
He stares at me. His hand leaves my waist and rises to my face, his thumb tracing beneath my eye as if checking that I’m real. That I’m solid. That I’m not the ghost his nightmares probably spent two days conjuring.
“You took your time,” he says, his voice rough with sleep and hoarse with something deeper.
“I’ve been told I slept for two days.” I press my cheek into his palm. “In my defense, someone slit my throat.”
His jaw tightens. The humor doesn’t quite land, the memory still too raw, too close. His thumb keeps moving beneath my eye, stroking as though the repetition is the only thing tethering him to the present.
“You almost didn’t come back,” he says quietly. The sleep haze has burned away, leaving something sharp and fragile in its wake. “I called for you. Over and over. And you just…kept drifting.”
I just shrug. “Too comfortable with Death.”
His jaw works. “I was beginning to think you’d fooled me after all. Got me to shatter the crown and break the curse, then decided to slip through into the light rather than stick it out with me.”
A laugh catches in my throat, wet and unexpected. “Now that would’ve been a scheme worthy of a gravedigger.”
He arches a brow. “It’s not funny, Elara.”
“A little, maybe?”
“No.” His mouth curves anyway, slow and unsteady, into the most genuine smile I’ve ever seen on him. “I don’t know how to dig a grave properly, you saw so yourself.” He lifts our joined hands and presses his lips to my fingers, lingering there. “If you’d stayed dead, I would’ve had to bury you myself, and it would’ve been a disgrace.”
I bark out a laugh that scrapes my healing throat raw and makes me wince. “That’s your concern? The craftsmanship of my burial?”
His eyes crinkle at the corners, and there it is again, that warmth, blooming slow and real through the green of his irises, so alive it makes my heart beat faster. “I missed you.”
His arms tighten around me, pulling me back to rest on his chest. His lips press into my hair. And for a long, unhurried while, we simply lie there in the warmth of a sun-drenched room, listening to the hum of crocus-bearing crowds beyond the gate, the crackle of a hearth that burns instead of gutters, and the quiet, steady rhythm of a heart that finally, finally, beats whole.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Elara
Lavender drifts on the sun-warmed wool.
I lie on my back in the center of it, one arm behind my head, watching clouds drift across a sky so blue it feels like a personal affront to every gray, rot-choked morning the realm ever endured. Below the hill, fields stretch out in every direction—young stalks of grain pushing through dark soil in neat, green rows that ripple when the wind passes through them like fingers through hair.
Growing. All of it.
Vale sits beside me, his back propped against the trunk of an oak that’s already flushed with new leaves, a spread of bread, cheese, and dried fruit arranged on a cloth between us. He tears a piece of bread and offers it to me without looking up from the view.
I shake my head, hand going to my stomach. “I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten since this morning.”
“I had an apple.”
“Half an apple.” He turns the bread toward me again, brow arched. “The other half you fed to a horse that wasn’t yours.”
“She looked hungry,” I say, waving the bread away.
Vale watches me for a moment, then sets the bread down and shifts closer, abandoning the food entirely. “If my wife won’t eat,” he murmurs, his hand finding the curve of my waist where my dress has ridden up just enough to bare a strip of skin, “then perhaps I shall.”
His mouth finds my neck before I can roll my eyes.
