Page 46 of Laced in Longing

“You are mine,” Ash snarls against my ear, his arms still locked around me like steel bands. “You do not get to leave me again.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ASH

Pain lances through my spine as we crash onto the unforgiving concrete. The physical sensation is so new it shocks me more than the actual fall.

My lips graze Maven’s ear. “You are mine. You do not get to leave me again.” Whether she receives that as a promise or a threat, I do not care, because it is both.

My flower’s weight embraces my own—fragile yet somehow the heaviest burden I’ve ever carried.

What have I done? The thought tears through me, merciless as the stone below. I shouldn’t be here. Not like this. Not solid or breathing Earth’s air, not tangled up in her the way I am right now, with her back curved into me like she was made to fit there. Technically, she was. But that’s not the point.

The point is, I shouldn’t be able to feel her at all.

For a thousand years I’ve been smoke and invisible to this world—a ghost she never believed existed. I’ve reached for her in endless lifetimes and caught nothing but the thirst of what I wanted. Needed. I’ve watched her die more times than I can stomach, always from the wrong side of a barrier I couldn’t cross, screaming her name into a void that swallowed every syllable. And each time, I’ve had to stand there and let it happen because the rules of this world are older than me, older than the Bright Gods who wrote them, and they’ve never once bent.

Except…

I’m holding her.

My arms are locked around her middle. My hands—which should pass through her being—are gripping fabric and warmth and the small, frantic rise and fall of her lungs. She’s here. She’s real above me, and I’m real under her, and the world hasn’t cracked open to swallow us both for the sin of it.

So I wait. I lie there on the freezing rooftop with her heaving against me and brace for it—the tearing, unmaking, or whatever punishment the balance decides to deliver for a god who forgot his place.

There are reasons we cannot be here. Our forms would break the minds of mortals who looked at us, for one. The gods do not walk this world with skin and bone. We haunt it and feed at its edges. We savor our little tastes of sustenance and slink back to the Otherworld.

And yet, as I lie here, nothing happens.

The snow keeps falling. Somewhere below a car horn blares, and the city hums along as if nothing at all has shifted in the order of things. Just the two of us breathing, while Maven’s heart beats like a rabbit’s and mine—well, do I even have a heartbeat here? I’ve never checked. Never had a body to check with.

But I don’t have time to catalog the impossibilities right now, because it finally sinks in; the thing that matters more than the rules I’ve just broken:

I’m touching her.

I roll us before I’ve decided to, some instinct turning her in my arms until she’s flat on her back and I’m braced over her, one hand planted by her head, the other still hovering like a fool in the air between us. Her eyes widen, gray in the center and wet at the corners. I wait for the fear. I know her fear—the same I’ve watched flood her features across centuries before she ran from it and me every time I got too close.

It doesn’t come.

She only stares at me, chest jumping, lips parted, and there’s no terror there at all.

Awe. That’s what it is.

I know she still can’t see me. The silk she believes I wear is nowhere—it doesn’t exist, not really; it is but her mind’s mercy, so her mortal brain doesn’t crack trying to hold my gaze—but she stares like she’s trying to see through it anyway. Like if she looks hard enough, she’ll find me under the veil.

The phantom weight of disappointment settles over my features, the same as always, and I hate it. I’ve never hated it more than right now. Because for the first time in a thousand years I could show her. Fuck, I want to show her. I need her to look at me and know exactly who has loved her this whole time. Even solid, here with her breath fanning warmth across my jaw, that one thing stays locked away from her:

Pity.

“You’re real,” she says. It’s not a question. It barely even sounds like it’s meant for me—more like she’s telling herself and testing the shape of it on her tongue.

An undeniable urge engulfs me.

I peel the glove from my right hand with my teeth, quick and clumsy, spitting it aside because I need it gone. Nothing shall remain between my skin and hers.

And then I touch her.

I trace two fingers down the curve of her cheek, following the track of the tears she cried on the ledge, and the noise that scrapes out of my chest is embarrassing. Undignified. A thousand years of composure gone in the half second it takes to learn that she’s soft. And, oh, so warm. That mortal skin gives a little under a touch and holds the heat of the blood beneath it. She smells of salt and something floral, the thing my instincts have chased across a millennium of lifetimes.