I settle between her thighs. Fuck, she looks beautiful. Dark hair sprawled out around her, skin slick with our sex, and eyes dark.
She touches my cheek, the gesture unnatural for her, and pulls at something in my chest. “Don’t lock me in like that again.”
I smirk. “Am I to let you run?”
Her smile dies slowly. The part of her that’s always half on a cliff looks at me. “I run only when I’m chased.”
“So don’t make me chase you…” I nip at her bottom lip.
“I want you to chase me.” The honesty delivers yet another harsh slice to the chest. “I just don’t want you to lock me away.”
I cup her face and stroke the edge of her cheekbone. “I don’t know how to control you.” The words taste like bitter acid, and I feel the first pulse of fatigue wave through my body.
“Because you can’t,” she says, matter-of-factly. I know it’s true. And the words from my brothers once again invade our space.The bond would never allow the other to want to be away from them. They’d kill each other before wanting to be away.So why does she fucking fight me?I feel it. I feel it all. Why the fuck doesn’t she?
I want to tell her I am trying to learn not to control her by doing the smaller things. That putting her on my lap in front of an entire school and announcing I could crown her is what that looked like in my head, a way to show her she means more. That she belongs and not for just for a moment. That teaching her to portal, even if we kept failing and fell into my bed, was me trying to learn to trust she won’t run. That the thing in the water was a test I thought she could chew and spit but surprised me when it almost had her in tears.
“Come with me to the ball at the week’s end,” I say instead.
She searches my face with slight suspicion. Smart girl. “You’re serious? Why?”
“Because they’ll learn you,” I say. “The more they see us together, the more they’ll understand.” I drag my teeth over her cheekbone, circling my hips. “They’ll learn to love you as a weapon to use, not one to be afraid of.”
“Or maybe I’ll just cut you,” she says.
I brush my nose against hers. “You already do.”
She closes her eyes for a heartbeat. Something fierce settles there.
“Fine,” she says. “But if Creed looks at me like a problem, I will become one.”
“It’s his favorite hobby,” I say. “But not at the ball. Save your wrath for another day.”
She laughs, short. Punch-drunk. “Deal.”
Chapter Eighteen
Haide
The Flying Grounds are nothing like the rest of Rathe U. There are no polished stone walkways or pristine enchanted gardens meant to impress visiting royals. No ancient sculpture or scripture meant to make one gifted feel more inferior than the other. No distinction based on where they came from, the family names that built their realm, or the ones who merely exist within it. I may be from the island, but even there it was easy to see the hierarchies in the world of magic.
There is a food chain in every area: animal, human, and gifted alike.
Out here, the land is raw and sprawling, a wide circular basin carved into the hillside with cliffs rising on all sides. High enough for a dragon to launch. Low enough for a Fae to fall without dying when they’re still learning how to use their wings. Probably.
The afternoon sun spills through the canopy in fractured beams, catching on the floating practice rings that drift lazily across the field like oversized halos. Grassy patches give way to dark, scorched dirt in places where dragon fire has kissed the ground, leaving spirals of blackened ash curling like old scars. Farther out, massive stone perches jut from the terrain, smooth from centuries of scaled bodies landing and leaping again.
It’s huge, open, humming faintly with leftover magic—like every creature that’s ever flown here left behind a piece of itself.
I like it.
It feels honest. Untamed.
Not suffocating with rules, etiquette, or all the shit the rest of the university shoves down your throat the second you blink at the wrong noble.
And best of all.
It’s empty.
