Asharin let out a quiet breath that might have been a laugh if it were not tangled with tears.
“I am very real.”
Her hand trembled slightly where it rested against his cheek.
Emotion moved through her with a fragile intensity as she leaned down to him, lowering her forehead until it rested againsthis, as though the simple contact grounded them both after everything that had nearly torn them apart.
“You crossed the world.”
“Tried to.”
A quiet, trembling laugh escaped her through tears, the sound carrying disbelief and relief in equal measure. She searched his face, still struggling to reconcile the man before her with the impossible distance he had crossed to reach her.
“I love you,” she said softly.
The words moved through him, warm and disorienting after months of cold.
“Love you,” he said.
The vast hall surrounding them receded from his awareness until the shouts of guards and the uneasy murmuring of the court felt distant and hollow, as though the entire kingdom had been pushed to the edges of the moment while the world narrowed to the woman kneeling beside him.
His attention drifted to the white silk of her gown resting near his temple. At first he did not understand what he was seeing. The shape pressed close enough that he could feel its warmth against his temple. Then the full, undeniable curve beneath the silk drew his focus upward, and realization followed.
Slowly, painfully, his eyes lifted back to her face.
Asharin watched him quietly, her hand resting against the soft rise beneath the fabric as though guarding something precious. Tears slid down her cheeks even as she smiled. “Yes,” she whispered softly.
The word answered the question he had not yet managed to ask.
For a long moment he simply looked at her. A laugh broke from him then. Half hysterical, half disbelieving. It turned into a cough that rattled painfully through his chest.
“You’re serious,” he rasped.
“Mine,” he breathed, his hand tightening over her stomach.
“Yours.” Asharin smiled through the tears finally slipping down her cheeks.
The long journey flashed through his memory in fragments. Frozen valleys, endless marches through the dead, nights when the cold pressed so deeply into his bones that he wondered whether he would ever see another sunrise.
Yet every mile had carried him toward this moment. Toward her. Toward the life she now carried. With visible effort he lifted his hand and placed it over hers, his palm resting against the curve of her stomach. Warmth greeted him there, living and undeniable, and something deep within his chest shifted in response, filling the hollow ache left by cold and distance with a quiet wonder.
“I told you, we are not broken,” Asharin whispered, tears slipping down her cheeks.
“We’re matched,” he murmured.
She nodded, her fingers tightening beneath his hand.
She leaned down and kissed his forehead, then pressed his hand more firmly against her stomach. “I told you I would give you everything.”
For several long seconds he simply looked at her, committing the sight to memory with a reverence he had never felt for any throne or title: the brightness of her golden hair, the softness of her smile, the impossible truth that she had survived the cruelty of the world and still remained here beside him.
“Wings,” he whispered.
Darkness closed over his vision, gentle now, because the only thing that had ever mattered was finally within reach.
He had found her.
CHAPTER 31
