His arms closed around her, pulling her against his chest as his wings beat once, twice, driving them up and away from the killing drop below. She gasped, her hands clutching at hisshoulders, her body trembling against his as the ground fell away beneath them.
“Rhyx—” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Your wings?—”
“Later.”
Below them, Martin had stumbled backward—shocked, perhaps, by the transformation he’d just witnessed. But his retreat had taken him too close to the edge, and the loose rock of the ledge was crumbling beneath his feet.
Rhyx watched, Alina cradled safely in his arms, as Martin’s expression shifted from shock to terror.
“No—wait—help me?—”
The ground gave way.
Martin screamed as he fell, a high, thin sound that echoed off the canyon walls and went on and on and on until it cut off abruptly, finally, completely.
Silence.
Alina buried her face against Rhyx’s chest. He could feel her shaking, could hear the ragged hitch of her breath as she fought against the sobs that wanted to escape.
“It’s over.” He pressed his lips against her hair, holding her close as his wings carried them higher into the pale Martian sky. “He can’t hurt you anymore. No one can hurt you anymore.”
“You have wings.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t tell me you had wings.”
“I didn’t know.” He adjusted his grip on her, marveling at how natural this felt—the wind beneath his pinions, the world spread out below him like a map, his mate safe and warm in his arms. “They weren’t there before.”
Alina pulled back just enough to look at him, her eyes red-rimmed but filled with wonder rather than fear.
“What are you?”
“I don’t know.” He met her gaze, letting her see the truth in his eyes—the confusion, the uncertainty, the strange exhilaration of discovering yet another piece of himself that he hadn’t known existed. “But whatever I am, I am yours.”
She laughed—a wet, broken sound that was half sob, half genuine amusement.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Is it untrue?”
“No.” She reached up, her fingers brushing against his jaw. “No, it’s not untrue at all.”
Below them, the Martian landscape stretched out in endless waves of rust and ochre, ancient and new all at once. Behind them, the cave system that had birthed him sat quiet and waiting, its secrets not yet fully revealed. And somewhere ahead…
Somewhere ahead was a future he couldn’t see. A world he didn’t fully understand. Enemies who would come for them, questions that had no easy answers, challenges that would test everything they were and everything they could become.
But Alina was in his arms.
And he had wings.
For now, that was enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Martin’s scream cut off with a sickening finality.
Alina pressed her face harder into Rhyx’s chest, her fingers digging into his shoulders as if letting go would send her tumbling after the man who’d just fallen to his death. The wind whipped at her hair, cold and thin and utterly wrong because they were flying, actually flying, and the ground was so far below that she couldn’t bring herself to look.
