There’s no arguing with him.
The rest of the day is a blur. The fort’s routines go on, but we don’t leave the quarters. We alternate between anger and need, words and bodies crashing against each other in a cycle that doesn’t stop until night falls and we are both too spent to move.
I lie on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He’s beside me, an arm thrown across my ribs, breath slow and steady.
“I don’t want to be the only thing holding your world together,” I say.
His arm tightens around me. “You are not,” he says.
I turn my head slightly, searching his face in the dim light.
“It will bend before it breaks.” His thumb lingers over my curves, as if memorizing them. “For many centuries, rulers did not take Starfallen mates. We were built for governance. For war. For order.” His hand tightens gently at my waist. “Perhaps that was incomplete.”
I study him in the dark. “You’re admitting to me that there might be something wrong with the way Xytheos is run?”
His sculpted features are shadowed. “I have been preparing for contingencies,” he says cryptically.
“You’re planning something.”
His mouth curves faintly. “Yes.”
“What?”
He pulls me closer. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 38
THE HEART OF THE JUNGLE
ELENA – IN FLIGHT
The skiff drops low,slicing through the humid air. Rythar steers one-handed, the other anchoring me at the hip. Every time we bank, his grip tightens. I pretend it’s for stability, but the mate bond in my chest flares every time he pulls me in.
We’re flying blind, without nav lights, or comms. There’s only the line of the river to our right, and the jungle getting out of our way as the skiff passes through it. He’s told me nothing about where we’re going. Only that we would leave at full dark.
It’s pitch black except for the illuminated strip around the cockpit. The glow paints Rythar’s face in soft red, sharpening his jaw and making his scars look deeper. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t look away from the canopy, not even once. But the hand at my hip? It never moves.
He banks the skiff into a deadfall ravine, skimming so close to the branches I can see water beading on the leaves. He cuts the engine, and we glide the last hundred meters, silent and perfect, until the hull bumps the soft jungle floor and slows to a stop.
He lifts me out, one arm behind my knees, the other under my shoulders.
“What are you up to?” I smile up at him.
One corner of his mouth tilts up, but he says nothing.
The skiff seals itself behind us as vines close over it.
He insists on carrying me bridal-style as we leave the skiff behind. His body heat seeps into mine. Every few steps, I hear the click and pop of a flexing vine or a branch making way. It’s not just the physical. There’s a current in the air, a psychic pressure that gets stronger the deeper we go. It’s the power of the jungle, trickling through Rythar and into me.
He finally sets me down at the edge of a low stone rise, nearly invisible under the carpet of moss and lichen.
“Is this what you were building?” I ask.
He grunts, vines move, and a seam splits open, revealing a hollow that is not cave or house or bunker, but somehow all three.
The door isn’t metal or even proper wood. It’s a living sheath, woven of vines and bark. It uncurls at his touch and seals behind us, thick enough to muffle the outside world.
He leads us inside. It’s a spiral of rooms that nest deeper and deeper underground. I can’t see more than a few meters ahead, but I sense the place is huge beneath the moss.
