I look. His pale violet eyes hold mine while I ride him in a stone chamber under a dying city, and I think: if this is the last thing, it's enough.
He rolls us — my back against the cloak, his body over mine, pushing deep and staying there, forehead to mine, hands cradling my face.
"I want this to be the last clear thing," he says. "Whatever happens."
"Then make it clear. Make me feel you."
He moves — deep and slow and devastating, pulling nearly out and sliding back in, and I wrap my legs around him and feel every inch. His hips snap harder and I cry out and he swallows it with his mouth and it goes on, this slow desperate breaking-open of everything we've carried.
"Come for me," he says against my lips. "Let me feel you."
I come apart under him with his name in my throat and my whole body shaking, my pussy clenching around his cock in waves that pull him over — he follows with a sound half groan and half prayer, spilling inside me while his arms shake.
He collapses. I catch him. I hold him with his face in my neck and press my mouth to his temple and hold on.
After.We lie on the cloak and the city trembles above us and the ritual circle pulses twenty feet away.
"Dawn," I say eventually. Someone has to.
"Dawn."
"You have to let go of the power voluntarily. All of it. In the circle."
"I know."
"Are you afraid?"
"Yes."
"Me too."
"Good. Afraid together is better than afraid alone."
I put my head on his chest. His heartbeat is slow and steady under my ear, the one I've been checking since the safehouse. Still here. Still him.
"When this is over," I say, "I want to sleep in a real bed with actual pillows. For three days."
"I'll arrange it."
"And then I want to rebuild the Tanner's Row houses. With my hands. No politics."
"I'll carry the lumber."
"The Shadow Sovereign carrying lumber."
"The things I'll do for you," he says, quiet and real, and I close my eyes and hold his heartbeat and the future we just built out of nothing — a promise and a stone floor and each other — and I let it be enough.
Dawn comes. We get up. We walk to the circle together.
30
SEVARETH
The circle is warm when I step into it.
Not hot. Not the violent, demanding heat I expected. Warm, the way Mireya's hand is warm when she puts it on my chest. I notice this because noticing things is what I do — cataloguing, documenting, filing — and because it might be the last thing I notice, so I want to get it right.
She's standing at the circle's edge. Not inside it. I asked her not to — whatever Vaustren intended to use the connection for, I don't want her anywhere near the Maw's reach when I open the door. She argued. I won. She's standing two feet outside the boundary with her arms crossed and her jaw set and the expression of a woman who is allowing this on a provisional basis and reserves the right to intervene at any time.
