“Save your fury, my Bonded. There is more at stake than violation.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?” Kailorien choked out, the agony of the voice roaring in his ears. “What if he’d killed her? What if he’d—"
Auryn shook her head.
“I will not last this way,”the voice whispered.“You have neglected your Bonded. This heat is my call to my Silari. For Breathweaving. For you. Only my Silari may breathe into me. For we were never separate. Never apart. We are one in soul, in origin.”
His head was pounding, but the longer her hand remained on his face, the more the pain from Vargrún receded back into the shadows. Guilt swelled at her tone.
Neglected.
The word echoed in the chambers of his inner doubt.
“I tried,” he bit out. “Again and again. I couldn’t help her. I breathed, but—.”
“Because you held back. Because you fear what you are.”She forced him to meet her gaze.“How can you let the current carry you, if you do not surrender to it?”
A pause.
“You can be Resh’Agar…and you can be Silari. So be, my Bonded…Be.”
The golden glow flickered.
Auryn’s body tilted. The fevered haze returned as the entity faded, leaving Auryn weak and shaking and utterly spent.
“Kail…” Her voice broke, hands scrambling to catch at the large buckles of his armor, small fingers slipping into the grooves of his chest plate and anchoring herself to him.
“It hurts…help me…”
He caught her, held her, pulled her to his chest, one hand cupping the back of her head, the other pressed flat against her back. “I have you. I swear to the Void, Auryn—I’ll fix this. Let me try.”
Her arms wound around his neck. She flinched in pain. Nodded.
“Hurry…it hurts to breathe…”
“Let me in,” he whispered, kissing her temple. “Please. Let me in.”
She shuddered in his arms. His thumb grazed her cheekbone, her jaw. She tilted her face up to his, eyes glazed with suffering—but her lips parted all the same.
That was all the permission he needed.
He kissed her.
Not a breathless whisper of affection, but a desperate soul-carving. Groaning into her mouth, tasting her sigh,knowing, feelingthe relief in it. As though he’d applied a poultice to a burn. Hebegged—not with words, but with his tongue, with his hands, with the way he braced her against the length of his body. Begged without shame for her to let him give her what she needed.
And she responded.
Shy at first. Then with a rising hunger.
Her hands—those delicate hands—tightened at his neck. She leaned into the heat of him. Her fingers slipped into his hair like bristles into ink, nails drawing paintings of her desire into his skin with primal friction. His mouth left hers to trail lower—to her cheek, the edge of her jaw, the pulse in her throat. He kissed there too, and she whimpered.
“Kail…” she breathed, barely audible.
“I’m here,” he vowed into her skin. “I’myours.”
She trembled—head falling back so his lips found her neck, the hollow beneath her ear.
“I’m going to fix this,” he swore, voice ragged. “No more pain. No more holding back.”
