Page 167 of Burn of the Everflame

His chest rose with a sharp, sudden breath, the kind you take after breaching the water’s surface within seconds of sinking forever.

“I thought of you every day on Coeurîle,” I said. “There were so many times I came close to giving up. I told myself that you were waiting for me, so I had to be strong. I had to make it home—to you.” A tear rolled free, but my smile grew. “You think you failed me on that island? Luther, you’re the only reason I survived. You didn’t let me down, you saved me.”

“Diem,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion.

“I’m scared,” I admitted. “I’m confused. I’m completely overwhelmed. I’m tired, and I’m so fucking angry. What you said about a part of me being stuck on the island . . . I think you might be right. Sometimes I feel like I’m still trapped there. Everywhere I go, I’m surrounded by people who love me, but I’ve never felt so . . .” My voice broke. “ . . . so alone.”

He reached for me, and I placed a hand on his chest to hold him back. I stared at the bare skin beside it, where his scar had routed around his heart, thanks to Lumnos’s intervention. To save it for me, she’d claimed.

There, I thought. His mating mark belongs there.

But that was a line I still couldn’t cross. This was the bargain my heart and mind had struck: I would not steal Luther’s future—but I could give him my today.

“I don’t know if I can kill Ophiucae,” I admitted. “I don’t think I want to, but I’m not sure I can live with myself if I don’t. I’ve always trusted my heart to guide me, but I’m worried that following my heart now means letting everyone down. I feel . . . broken. So completely broken.”

I stared again at his scar, the mark so many had called a flaw and urged him to repair. The scar that I loved.

I slid my hand up his neck and into his hair, and I pulled his face to mine. “I’m broken,” I repeated, a whisper against his lips, “but every shattered piece of me is yours.”

At long last, I set down my armor, and his response was a crumbling dam giving way, desperate and hopeful and trembling with relief. He hauled me into his arms so my legs dangled beneath me, and I wondered if some part of him still feared that I might run.

“I’m yours,” I vowed. “I will always be yours.”

“Diem,” he rumbled from deep within his chest. “My Queen. My heart. My⁠—”

I captured his mouth again, unable to bear another second without his lips on mine. He kissed me like he was breathing me into his lungs, pulled me against him like he might fuse our bodies into one. I raked my fingers through his hair, and he carried me to a nearby tree, pinning me hard between his body and the trunk.

Another trap to keep me at his side.

I tore at his clothes, a woman determined. I needed to replace the memories the Centenaries had tainted with their mockery, desperate for a moment that belonged only to us. I let my mouth roam over his neck, his chest, his scar, leaving my mark on his skin not in the way I wished for, but in the only way I could. My hands skated over his granite muscles and glistening skin, and the mating bond gave a euphoric purr.

He held himself back, answering my kisses but not my touch, treating me like a wild animal that one wrong move might spook. I goaded him on with grinding hips and clawing nails, and tugged his lower lip between my teeth. It was only when my hand slid over his pants, palming his growing hardness, that he began to move—slowly, languidly, hands skimming my skin, drinking his fill of my touch as I’d done with him.

I’d warned him before that I was not the same Diem, and he’d warned the same of him. We took those words in earnest, learning each other’s bodies all over again. I thrilled at the new roughness to his palms, calloused from labor in the camps and training with recruits. His lips blazed a trail down my chest, and I shivered at the scratch of his beard on my sensitive skin, then shivered again wondering what it might feel like between my thighs.

My heart stuttered as his fingers neared the mark on my chest. I yearned for his hand to lay over it and feel how it burned for him. A little piece of me sighed inside as I took his wrist and guided it elsewhere instead—beneath the slit in my skirts that rose all the way to my hip, and then to my wet, aching warmth.

“For you,” I rasped. “Only for you.”

His chest rumbled as he stroked the soaked lace of my undergarments. “Touch me,” he demanded, his voice dark with dominant command.

I tugged clumsily at the fastenings of his pants, and we both let out a shallow breath as my hand slipped inside and curved around his hard arousal.

“For you,” he growled. “Only for you.”

Instantly, I knew mouths and hands would not be enough. “Do you think,” I said between gasps as his fingers dipped beneath the lace, “we could find—ah—someone at camp with the—gods, Luther—the contraceptive tonic?”

“I’ve already been taking it.”

I let out a surprised laugh, and his cock twitched in my hand. “You were that certain I would give in?”

“I was that certain I wouldn’t give up.” His ravenous gaze dropped to my mouth. “Laugh for me again. I want to taste it.” I smiled and obeyed, and he seized my mouth in a deep, probing kiss that matched the movement of his fingers. I answered with a slow caress of his length.

He tugged one strap of my gown off my shoulder, and my right breast spilled into the evening air. I arched into him with a whimper as he pulled its stiff bud into his mouth, circling with his tongue before dragging it gently through his teeth.

The thought shimmered through my lust-fueled haze that he was again perilously close to my mark. I didn’t want to take control. In a world where countless lives hinged on my every decision, giving my body to Luther had become an act of liberation. Only when I trusted him completely did I finally start to feel free.

But freedom, even with him, was a luxury I couldn’t afford.