Khaelor is there. He does not touch my skin, but his towering frame blocks out the meager light in the hall, pinning me against the only intact pillar remaining in the room. The heat rolling off his chest is ripe with the scent of wild magic and dark, masculine exertion.
The jagged blade of condensed decay stops exactly one millimeter from the pulse point at the base of my throat.
The toxic energy hums against my skin. The golden undertones of my flesh rise to meet it, a microscopic barrier that refuses to yield to the rot. I am caged between the cold, hard stone of the pillar and the absolute devastation of his body.
My chest heaves, the heavy leather of my tunic brushing against the canvas of his. Our physical closeness is a dangerous, gravity-heavy friction. He is staring down at me, his chest rising and falling with his own harsh breaths, his amber eyes burning with a mixture of wrath and profound, unnamable awe.
He waits for the curse to leap from the blade to my throat. He waits for the rot to finally take hold.
It does not. I only look up at him, my chin lifted, refusing to flinch away from the blade.
Slowly, the black-gold weapon dissolves into vapor, the magic dissipating into the heavy air. Khaelor leans in, the space between our faces practically nonexistent. The restraint radiating from him is absolute, trembling violence.
"You do not break," he whispers, the realization a heavy, gravel-strewn confession.
"I am not fragile," I answer, my voice tight from the lack of air.
He holds my gaze, the tension between us thick enough to sever steel. But before he can step away, the obsidian relic at my waist hits a critical, piercing frequency.
The hum detonates inside my skull.
The dueling hall vanishes. The polished obsidian floor is replaced by a landscape of churning, black fire. My ears ring with the sound of a hundred voices chanting in perfect, agonizing unison. The words are heavy, profane, tasting of iron and grief. I gaze down at my own hands, but they are smeared with blood and ash, tracing the final lines of a massive, destructive sigil into the earth.
Burn the root,a voice screams in my mind. It is my voice, thick with a hatred I do not recognize.Let the house rot from within!
A violent tremor seizes my body. I gasp, the vision shattering as quickly as it took me, throwing me back into the cold, decaying air of the dueling hall. My knees buckle, the strength completely sheared from my muscles.
Khaelor steps forward, his hands twitching and eyes reflecting a desperate instinct to catch me battling the absolute certainty that his touch will kill.
6
KHAELOR
The morning air in the library is thick with the metallic taste of my own volatile magic. I stand in the shadows of the elevated gallery, looking down at the heavy oak table where Mireya sits.
It has been eighteen hours since she collapsed in the dueling hall. Eighteen hours since I stood over her unconscious body, my hands trembling with the agonizing, primal instinct to pick her up, warring with the absolute certainty that my touch would strip the flesh from her bones. She recovered quickly from whatever weakness that assailed her with a stubborn wave of her hand.
Now, she sketches in her ledger. The scratch of her charcoal pencil is the only sound in the cavernous room.
She does not look up, but her voice cuts through the stagnant gloom. "You hover like a gargoyle, Lord Khaelor. The durability of that balcony is already compromised. Your brooding will only hasten its collapse."
I do not shift my stance. "I am monitoring my perimeter."
"I am not a perimeter," she counters, finally lifting her chin. The warm, golden tones of her skin catch the meager lightbleeding through the clerestory windows. "I am trying to map the ward fluctuations from yesterday. Your staring disrupts my focus."
"My presence disrupts the cellular structure of living organisms," I murmur, my voice a low rasp that vibrates down the winding iron staircase. I descend, leaving the shadows of the gallery. "Your focus is the least of my concerns."
"You are obsessed with my mortality." She turns in her chair, facing me completely as I reach the ground floor.
"I am obsessed with the anomaly you present." I stop five paces from her. The scent of her—clean sweat, old paper, and a faint, stubborn heat that smells distinctly of humanity—cuts through my oppressive aura. "You exist within the jaws of a cataclysm, and you refuse to act like prey."
Her dark eyes narrow, mapping the black-gold veins pulsing along my exposed forearms. "Perhaps I do not consider you the predator you believe yourself to be."
The friction between us pulls at the rotting edges of my restraint. I want to close the remaining distance. I want to cage her against the edge of the ironwood table, force the ambient decay to wrap around her throat, and demand she acknowledge the absolute lethality of my existence. The possessiveness taking root in my chest is a dark, feral thing. She is the only living creature in a century that has not withered in my shadow. She is mine to observe. Mine to test.
Before the friction can ignite into something unforgivable, a high, mechanical shriek splinters the quiet of the estate.
The outer courtyard wards scream.
