I glance up, my hands pausing. “Yes, we have.”
“Maybe we can start over from here,” Lurok suggests, his tail shifting restlessly against the stone floor. “Not act as if none of what I said to you did not happen, but start anew.”
“Your words hurt more than I can put into words,” I whisper, dabbing salve onto a particularly angry burn.
He flinches, though whether from my words or the sting of the salve, I can’t tell. “I was a fool, Serin.”
“On the battlefield,” he continues when I don’t respond, “when my element was waning, Varok said his fire was stronger with Leira, and I finally understood. The prophecy was never about destruction. Not about ending anything.” His hand catches mine, stilling my movements. “Together forged, the season’s power. But only love shall fully ignite their might. Bonding heart and soul, flame and light.It is about unity. About becoming stronger together than we could ever be apart.”
“I was wrong to push you away.” The admission seems to cost him something. His fingers tighten around mine. “I thought denying you would protect my people. Keeping my distance would stop what was coming. I was wrong about the prophecy and what it meant about us.”
Us? There hadn’t been anussince that night in the grotto, when he’d taken everything I offered and then rejected me so completely.
“I felt the truth of it,” he continues, his voice dropping to a rough whisper. “When you called the wind. It merged with mine, becoming something stronger, something I could not controlalone. It was like...” He searches for words, frustration creasing his brow. “Like the air itself recognized what I was too blind to see.”
I resume cleaning his wounds, needing the distraction of movement, of purpose. “And what were you too blind to see?”
“That we were never meant to be apart.” His hand lifts, gentler now, catching the loose strand of my hair and tucking it behind my ear, his fingers lingering as though memorizing the feel of me. His gaze holds mine, steady and unguarded. “I told myself I had to keep a distance between us. That denying you would protect my kind.
His voice lowers, rough with something deeper than regret. “But I was wrong. It took our threads a hundred years to find each other… and I nearly turned away from the one thing I was meant to keep.”
I work in silence, absorbing his words. Part of me wants to reject them, to protect myself from hoping again. But I had felt it too, that moment on the battlefield when my desperate call to the wind had somehow amplified his power, when I‘d felt connected to him across the chaos of battle as if by an invisible thread.
When I finally speak, my voice is hardly more than a whisper. “Say it again.”
Lurok looks confused. “That I was wrong about the prophecy. That the Season?—”
“No.” I cut him off, my fingers stilling on his chest. “What you said to me in the middle of the battle.”
Understanding dawns in his eyes. His expression is open and vulnerable, something I’ve never seen on his fierce face before.
Lurok’s hands rise to cup my face, his touch so gentle it makes my heart clench. Around us, the Flame room continues its frantic rhythm of healing and pain, but in this small spacebetween us, time seems suspended, waiting. His pale eyes hold mine with an intensity that anchors in the chaos around us.
“I love you,” he says, the words clear and deliberate. No hesitation, no qualification. Just three simple words that I never expected to hear from him. “I have loved you from the first moment I laid eyes on you, when you looked back at me without fear and saw through the monster to what I truly am.”
His thumbs brush my cheekbones with a reverence that makes me shiver. The fierce warrior who at first terrified me now touches me like I’m something precious, something he fears might shatter.
“You are everything to me,” he continues, his voice dropping lower so that only I can hear. “My bloodmate. My heart. The missing part of myself I was too frightened and too stubborn to claim.”
Bloodmate.I’ve heard Varok use it with Leira, seen the way it makes her eyes soften each time. To hear it from Lurok now, after everything, sends a tremor through me that I can’t hide.
“In the battle, when our elements joined,” he says, “it was like the air itself knew what I had been denying. You make me stronger, Serin. You make me... whole.”
My eyes fill with tears that I don’t try to blink away. They gather and spill, tracking warm paths down my cheeks, over his fingers. I want so badly to simply fall into this moment, to accept his words as the balm my heart has craved. But the memory of his rejection still stings beneath the surface.
“I believe you,” I whisper, and I do. The truth rings in his voice, shines in his eyes. “But Lurok, you hurt me. Deeply. You made me feel like I was nothing. Like what we shared meant nothing.”
“I know, and I was wrong,” His jaw tightens, regret darkening his expression. “I will spend the rest of my life making it right,” he vows, his voice thick with emotion. “However longit takes. I will never deny you again, Serin. Never deny what you are to me.”
The solemnity in his tone, the oath-like quality of his words, strikes me to the core. Lurok offers this to me freely, his eyes never leaving mine.
“I do not deserve your forgiveness,” he continues when I remain silent. “But I ask for the chance to earn it.”
Inside, I feel a wall crumbling, a door opening. The hurt is still there, but alongside it now blooms something warmer, something that feels like possibility.
I lift my hand to cover his, where it rests against my cheek. His scales are smooth beneath my palm, warmer than human skin, alive with the slight tremor of suppressed emotion.
“You promise?” I ask in a tearful whisper.
