“Every.” Jesstin nibbled her ear. “Fucking. Last.”
“You really don’t have any regrets?”
“Mountains of them,” he answered with a short laugh. “Loving you was never a choice though. How could I regret that which comes so natural?”
Elloven rode the rise and fall of his chest and let his words become her truth. She watched as the sharp brightness of lightrise become the warm bath of illumina. A new day had arrived out there, and inside their little room in the inn. “Don’t hold onto what my mother showed you. I don’t need any more answers. All they do is add to a past I’d rather let rest.”
“That seems best. For you.” Jesstin kissed her and shifted until he was on top of her. He dragged his teeth against his bottom lip. “Again.”
“Don’t you need to rest... in between?” Elloven asked, but she was already wrapping her legs around his, still on fire from the first time.
He reached down and guided himself in slowly, drinking her in. “I’ll show you what I need.”
Jesstin would never be the man to whisper romance in her ear, but she didn’t need or want that. She wanted him exactly as he was, messy and imperfect, a man who expressed himself through action. Words had never mattered half as much.
It was nearly an hour later when he slowly sat up with a reluctant sigh. “We have to go.”
He was right, sad as it made her. “Do you know where?”
“I just know we have to find the spiral.” He started dressing.
“The spiral?”
“If you’re looking for anything resembling sense, don’t look to me.” Jesstin buckled his belt.
She drank in the sheen of sweat on his bare chest as he searched for his shirt, and she almost wished she’d had the fore-sense to hide it. “We need to ask around then.”
“We need to be careful. Daire was supposed to reach out, but he hasn’t. I don’t know who else to trust.” He slid one arm into his shirt but hesitated at her disappointed look and grinned before continuing. “You don’t happen to know where the nearest sepulchral market is?”
“Don’t you think you’ve played close enough to the fire already?”
Jesstin sat beside her and helped unravel what few tatters remained of her dress at the waist. “That fire is all we have, and I’ll play with it, walk through it, even dance with it, until we come out the other side.” He leaned in for a quick kiss but let it linger. “Let’s make use of whatever light the gods please to give us today. Tonight, though...”
Elloven kneaded her forehead against his. “Tonight.”
Chapter 10
The Keeper of Maps
The advice Jesstin had received from the Southerlands man had been to simply think of the Forum Obscura and signs would appear. The first time, it had happened almost right away. But he’d been thinking of little else since they’d left Everspell nearly an hour ago, and there’d been no sign of anything.
Elloven was alert to their surroundings, but now and then he’d catch a dreamy smile that made him think dirty thoughts. He confirmed his discipline was still intact when he managed to keep his hands off her. But he had never felt more alive than he did walking beside her, in awe of everything she was and could be.
Of course this sensation would happen to him in the realm of the dead.
He kept revisiting her question about regrets, because though he’d answered her right away, it wasn’t actually simple at all. Did he? Not about loving her. Not about the choice to surrender his self-defeating ethics to share with her an intimacy that was still tearing through him like lightning. But no matter what she’d said, there was something he could do to destroy her love for him, and he’d already done it. He loved her more with every second that passed, rivaled only in his loathing for himself, but the prior night would never have happened if she’d known the truth about Gennady, and that was the problem.
Jesstin glanced at the bright sky. It was impossible to know how many hours of daylight they’d get. He needed the market. He needed a map. And he needed his fucking soul fragment back.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about this market, Jesstin, but nothing’s happening. Is there something else we need to do to make it appear?” Elloven asked. She shifted her satchel to the other shoulder, and he grabbed it instead, joining it with his own. “I can carry it.”
“I know,” he answered. “No, nothing else. Least there wasn’t last time.”
“Maybe it’s for the best.” She sounded relieved. “We’ll find this spiral another way.”
He had to tell her what he’d bargained away, but it didn’t have to be then. “Unless Daire miraculously appears to offer his erudite wisdom, then we do need the market.”
“Maybe Daire can’t contact you because you’re not actually dead.”
