When Osric speaks again, I don’t hear the words. I feel them instead, warm patches spreading across my cheek and throat where his breath lands. The ground under me carries a pulse, deep and patient, and I can’t tell whether it belongs to the desert or to me.
The world comes back to me a little at a time. My torn dress settles over my body. Arms slide under me and lift me, and thenhis chest is under my cheek, smooth and hot, rocking with every step as he carries me back toward the house.
The shaking stops somewhere along the way, and what’s left of me feels like a puddle of liquid poured into his arms. My body has gone limp, and I’m not afraid. I watch the sky. I watch the breathing cliffs. I watch his face above me, lit from inside by colors that shouldn’t exist, and for one strange, endless stretch, I swear he’s a god carrying me out of one life and into another.
I wonder if I’m dying. If this is death, it isn’t frightening. It’s bliss, pure, endless, and golden, and I want to stay here forever.
He lays me on a bed, and I feel cool sheets under me, then his hands. His voice stays low and constant, and the ceiling above me is alive with slow light. I float there for hours. For years. For eternity. Time means nothing. My body is far away, and at the same time, it’s more alive than it has ever been.
The colors fade, and I sleep.
Waking is slow and heavy. I blink at the ceiling, and my vision is perfectly clear.
Osric is beside me in bed, his face pale gray. His hand moves over my hair, then my cheek, then my hair again.
“You’re awake,” he whispers. “You’re here.”
“Yes.” My voice comes out hoarse, so I swallow and try again. “I feel amazing. Osric, we have to do it again. I want to always feel like that.”
He laughs, startled, and then the laugh cracks in the middle and turns into sobbing. He presses his face into my chest, and his whole body moves with it.
“Hey.” I wrap my arms around his head and hold him. “What’s wrong? I’m fine. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I thought you would die.” His voice is muffled against me, rough and low. “I was certain of it. I stung you and you screamed, and I thought, this is it, I’ve killed her.”
“You didn’t kill me.”
“Then you didn’t die, but you didn’t wake either, and I thought I’d made you sick. That I’d broken you. That I’d trapped you in some awful state and you’d stay there forever.” He lifts his head. His dark blue eyes are wet, and one tear has tracked down his cheek. “You’re alive. You’re healthy. You’re mine. I don’t know how to believe it.”
I take his face in both hands and kiss him, gentle and slow.
“Believe it,” I say. “I’m your fated mate. Now we know it, both of us. It’s clear as day. There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.”
He gathers me into his arms, tucks my head under his chin, and holds on.
The sun is rising outside, but neither of us cares. We fall asleep.
***
Hours later, we finally untangle ourselves, and I get a proper look at where I am. The walls are carved stone, the bed is wide, and his boots stand by the door. He didn’t carry me to my room. He carried me to his.
He runs a bath and washes me himself, kneeling in the tub, working the cloth over my skin slowly, barely pressing, checking my face after every pass. Bruises are scattered over my hips, wrists and thighs, purple and tender.
“I did this to you,” he says.
“They don’t hurt.”
“They shouldn’t exist.”
“Osric. They don’t hurt. I promise.”
He doesn’t argue, but he makes me stand up so he can kiss the bruise on my hip, then the one on my wrist, then every bruise he finds as he washes me. When he reaches the mark between my ribs, he pauses. It’s small and dark, the size of a fingertip.
“Does it hurt?” he asks.
“It’s numb.” I push my fingers into his wet hair. “You can stop worrying now.”
“No, I can’t,” he says, and kisses the mark his stinger left.
