He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch, lips pressed into a hard line like he was holding himself together by force. "Nothing about what happened to you is ok, I even had to murder innocent slaves in the process. I did so quickly, and took their pain away, but I hate myself, Delilah."
I glanced down at the floor, attempting to suppress the uneasy emotions welling up inside me.
“Titus…I know something about beingthatkind of slave, and trust me, a quick painless death might have been the first mercy they’d known in a long time.”
He looked to me, startled and broken. His mouth opened to speak but Istopped him.
“One day, when I’m ready, I will share my story.”
“But what you did gave the revolution here in Ashenport a huge advantage,” I said. “They asked us to join.”
He nodded, respecting my boundary, then he quirked a brow. “Oh? And what did you say?”
“I said yes, obviously,” I replied, and the fire returned to me with the words. “After we get the God Dragon and scare off Folliade’s invasion, we still have a lot to fix in the Kingdom of Flame.”
His mouth softened into something proud and tender. “Seems like you finally figured it out.”
“Figured what out?” I asked, genuinely confused.
He grinned widely, stared deeply into my eyes while sweeping my hair behind my ear. “That you are a ruler, Delilah.”
Emotion punched through me. I threw my arms around his neck and squeezed him like I needed to feel him solid and alive.
After the politics, we talked about our wedding. We decided on a private ceremony on the cliff overlooking the sea. He said he would find a Unifier in the morning—someone who conducted the blood binding ceremony. He made one request: that I wear red. I told him I wanted a ruby ring to match, and his eyes went soft like the color itself meant something deeper to him.
We made love two more times after that, until our bodies finally refused to move from exhaustion. We ate artisan bread and fine cheeses with red wine, naked and tangled together, and I laid my head on his warm chest. Around Titus, I never had to worry about being cold.
“After the wedding we’re going to have to go back to Embris,” he said, hesitation threading his voice. “We need to find the God Dragon.”
“I know,” I murmured, eyelids heavy. “But let’s have one more day of this bliss, and then we can go back to war plotting and strategizing.”
“Every day that I’m with you… is bliss… Pickles,” he whispered.
“I can’t believe I finally get to marry you tomorrow,” I said softly.
In the moonlight, I saw a glistening tear roll down his cheek. He pressed my hand to his lips and kissed it, long and reverent.
“I’ve waited a couple lifetimes to be your husband,” he whispered. “You make me so happy—don’t break my heart, Pickles, because you have all of it, and if you break it, there will be nothing left of me.”
“I promise,” I whispered, and the words felt like a vow as I drifted into sleep, naked in his arms, held by warmth and love and the fragile, terrifying hope that this time we would get to keep it.
CHAPTER 40
Dream Girl
DELILAH
Iwoke to the faint sounds of rhythmic beeping. My eyelids were heavy and my vision blurred. I couldn’t make out what I was seeing at first; everything looked so gray.
Immediately, within seconds of coming to, I was hit with immense stabbing pain, a raw, splintering ache that lit up every muscle and sinew at once. It was paralyzing and widespread, and my heart beat rapidly, and then the pounding intensified until alarms were sounding, and I wanted to scream but it was like I couldn’t convince my muscles to comply. At last I found my voice and I screamed a guttural, agonizing wail from the sharp ache that made my whole-body tremble. I tried to sit up, but my muscles were so weak that just moving my arms felt like lifting one-hundred-pound weights.
My vision snapped into focus and I froze in disbelief, so frozen from shock I couldn’t even breathe. I was in a hospital—where was Titus, what was going on? A nurse and a doctor rushed in and immediately started fumbling with buttons on the machines, and they…they were not Fae, they were human. THEY WERE HUMAN!
My lungs expanded and contracted at a rapid pace as the unfathomable settled in as reality. I was back in the mortal realm.
The room was too clean, too bright, too wrong, and the air smelled like antiseptic and plastic instead of smoke, salt, and magic. The machines kept chirping their steady little threats beside me, and my mind kept reaching for firelight and dragon scales and the weight of Titus’s hand, only to grasp empty sheets and cold rails. I turned my head, frantic, searching for amber eyes, for gold skin, for anything that proved I hadn’t been ripped away from him—
“NOOOOOOOOOOOO,” I sobbed. It was a cry that came from low in my gut and scraped the tops of my lungs with an agonizing burn. My cry filled the small room and blared down the sterile halls and back up into a faint echo.
