Silas shot up next to me, groaning as he shook his hands. I glanced over, realizing that he was completely drenched. Apparently, I’d taken some of the water back with me. We were both sopping wet, like we’d dragged ourselves straight out of a lake. I sort of had, but Silas was rightly confused.
Silas just stared at me. Breathless. We sat there for a long moment in silence. I was trembling, still caught between panic and relief.
“The third trial?” he asked.
“Yes,” I whispered. “It was a repeat of when we destroyed the wards, except this time, I had to do it alone. I needed to balance the elements while unlocking the crystal without your help.”
Silas tipped my chin upward. Water ran in rivulets down his face. His dark hair curled wildly, and he looked vulnerable, drenched, and breathtakingly gorgeous. Our lips met in a kiss that hummed at the same frequency as the magic I’d just worked. Silas, too, made sense to me on a molecular level—on a level that was smaller than the grains of sand. I loved him, and I told him so.
“I love you too, Alessia,” he said. “Congratulations. You’ve completed all your trials.”
“Thanks,” I said, still breathless, both from the adrenaline and from our kiss. “I’m just not sure what that means... or what happens next.”
“Nobody knows,” he said. “But I’d say this is a pretty important piece in your battle against evil.”
“Some days I wish the stakes weren’t so high,” I said. “I’d like to just have a bad dream, and then wake up and realize none of it was real.”
“I can’t help you with that,” Silas said. “But I can help you take your mind off things.”
I eyed him carefully.
“We’re both soaking wet,” he said. “And I’m not going to be able to go back to sleep. What do you say we hit the shower?”
I smiled, dragged myself out of bed, and tugged him toward the bathroom with me. As we stepped into the steam together, I thought maybe the high stakes were exactly what made everything feel so intense.
When I’d been with Simon, I’d never cared enough about anything to feel with such intensity. Now, I felt everything—when I experienced the bad, I felt like I would die. But when I experienced the good…
I brushed Silas’s hair from his face, watched the way his eyes melted like pools of chocolate as he cupped my chin. When it was good, it was so much better.
