TAVRIN
Dark.
Cold.
Falling.
I had been falling for a long time. Minutes or hours or years, I couldn’t tell anymore. The darkness had no edges. No bottom. Just the endless sensation of sinking into nothing.
Somewhere far away, my body still existed. I could feel it distantly, like a memory of warmth. The fever burning through me. The stone under my wings. The small, desperate sounds someone was making.
Wren. The sounds were Wren.
I tried to reach for her. Tried to climb back up through the dark toward her voice. But I had nothing left. The wall had taken everything. Holding myself together while her uncle threatened her had taken everything. The flight back had scraped out the last dregs of whatever I’d been running on.
Empty.
I was so empty.
Her voice again. Closer now. Words I couldn’t quite parse, but the shape of them was familiar. My name. She was saying my name.
I wanted to answer. Wanted to tell her I was trying. But the darkness was heavy and I was so tired and it would be easy, so easy, to just let go and sink the rest of the way down.
Then.
Heat.
Pressure.
Something pressed against my chest, and it burned like a brand, and the pain was exquisite because pain meant I could still feel. Pain meant I was still here.
Her hand. Her hand on my chest. Over my heart.
“Feel,” I heard myself say, though I didn’t remember deciding to speak. “Find me. Pull me. Back.”
And she did.
The bond blazed through me like sunrise.
One moment I was drowning in darkness, and the next there was light. Golden. Warm. Pouring into all the empty places, filling me up from the inside. I felt her heart beating against my palm, strong and fast and alive, and I felt my own heart stutter and then catch, finding her rhythm, syncing to her pulse.
I felt her.
Not just her hand on my chest. Not just her body pressed against mine. I felt everything. The fierce determination that had carried her through her uncle’s house. The terror she’d swallowed when she saw me on the balcony. The love she had been hiding even from herself.
She loved me.
She loved me and she was choosing me and she was pulling me back from the void with nothing but her heartbeat and her stubborn, magnificent will.
My eyes opened.
She was above me. Bare skin and loose hair and tears streaming down her cheeks. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen in any form, in any life.
“More,” I heard myself say. “Need. More of you.”
She understood. She always understood.
Her hand between us. The brush of her fingers against me, and I was already hard, had been hard since she’d pressed her body to mine, some part of me responding even when the rest was dying. She positioned me. Rose up on her knees.
