Page 188 of The Blood Rites

He kisses along my jaw, behind my ear, down the line of my throat. Every press of his lips is a question, and I answer yes, every time. My hands wander his chest, learning the shape of him. I want to memorise him.

When he peels off my shirt, he hesitates, his hand hovering over the scars on my ribs.

He looks up, a question in his eyes.

I nod. Permission.

He lifts my wrists, kissing the inside of each before setting my hands on his shoulders and holding them there, anchoring me.

He unfastens my trousers, so slowly it’s almost painful. His fingers quiver at the first touch of bare skin. I’m more nervous than I want to admit. We’ve seen each other naked before, but the urgency of his hands, the way his breath hitches when he looks at me—it unwinds something in me I didn't know I was holding.

He touches me like something breakable, not something owned, each movement unhurried and careful, like we’re creating a language from scratch.

I bury my face in his neck, breathing in the scent of spice and shadow and the heat of his skin. He groans softly when I bite his shoulder, not hard, the mark healing instantly.

When he enters me, it is slow, aching, but I want every second. I want to remember this. The pain is not new to me, but this is—being seen, being wanted, not as a thing to use or break, but as something worth holding.

He rocks into me, and I feel the shape of his lips as he whispers my name against my ear, kissing away every flinch and shudder. His hands are everywhere—my hips, my scars, my hair—as though he can hold me together through touch alone.

I reach up, tracing the tattoos across his chest, feeling the way the patterns pulse with each heartbeat.

The pleasure builds, easy and dangerous, and when I come, it is with my face buried in his shoulder, muffling the sound, too overwhelmed to be ashamed.

He keeps moving, watching every shudder like he’s memorising it.

He buries his face against my throat, holding me so tightly the Mother Shard will have to heal bruises.

When it’s over, he doesn’t let go. We collapse together, tangled in each other, our breathing synchronising.

The cracks in the ceiling shift, casting light in new patterns across our skin.

He strokes my hair, and I drift, the exhaustion finally catching up.

As I am about to slide under, I feel it—a small glow, not in the room, but in my chest. My mana, my light, seeping out of me without permission and into him. It spills across the sheets, over his arm, into his skin. It settles there, glowing for just a moment before it fades.

He sees it but says nothing. He just smiles and presses his mouth to my hair.

“You found me in the wild with half a heart,” he murmurs, voice low and heavy. “And then you just—”

But I never hear the rest.

I sleep, and this time, I am not afraid of what my dreams will bring.

Twenty Five

There is no descent into sleep. No drifting, no unfolding. I am simply here, in the dream, awake inside it, my consciousness snatched from my skull and hung in this place like a carcass.

White. And nothing else.

Endless white in every direction. No horizon or vanishing point, only the kind of light that sears the eyes and renders depth into a suggestion. Beneath my feet the ground is smooth, polished crystal—except my reflection is wrong. It doesn’t show me, but something fainter, thinner, like the surface isn’t of this world.

The world above should be a sky, but it isn’t. It’s a black sea, thick and motionless, floating just metres above my head, slick with tension. It wants to fall, but something holds it back. The weight of it crushes the air from my lungs.

Suspended in the sky is the golden death counter. Not in any one place, but in all of them—each direction I look, it’s there, a beacon of burning amber, numbers churning in a cycle I can’t decipher. The numbers stutter, unable to settle: fourteen, then a flicker of ten and seven overlapping. Then it splits into letters, XVII, before collapsing into sixteen, then fifteen, then seventeen, then ten, then seven, as though the counter can’t find its own boundary. Each shift feels like a heartbeat.

I am not alone.

She stands in front of me, not ten paces away: a woman sculpted from light. Skin almost translucent, veins threaded with gold. Her white robes, stitched with fine gold wire, fall in impossible, weightless drapes. Her hands are folded at her waist, every finger perfect. Her face is beautiful, but in a way that doesn’t look real—lips too precise, cheeks too symmetrical, hair thick and heavy with not a strand out of place. Her eyes are bottomless and in motion.