Текст книги "The wolf and the crown of blood"

Автор книги: Elizabeth May

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

I step up beside him. “How much did you bleed for it? How much of yourself did you carve out to keep the realms from killing each other?”

His eyes slide to mine as he considers me. I hold his stare, refusing to fidget beneath that ancient, unsettling regard.

“Everything I was,” he says. “And a good portion of what I might have been.” He turns back to the view. “I can’t take a Chosen, for example.”

I blink. “You can’t?”

“No.” A muscle flickers in his jaw. “Soulbonds don’t allow for both. It’s either one Chosen or thousands of Claimed, so I chose.”

“Your people over yourself.”

“Over everything.” His laugh is bitter. “You want the truth? I’m the oldest living Eternal, and I’m still young by our standards.” Something dark passes over his face. Something raw. “There should be elders waiting for me to mature before passing on their knowledge and choosing to be unmade. Instead, they’re all dead, and I’m left with their territories and their people and every fucking problem they left behind. Not to mention two young Eternals who’ve spent centuries more interested in slaughter than rulership that I’m responsible for. So, yes. I choose everyone else over what I want because that’s the burden I inherited when your people butchered mine.”

I flinch before I can stop myself. Wind tears at my hair, sending strands whipping across my face. I reach up and tuck them behind my ear with hands that aren’t quite steady.

“And if things were different?” I venture, careful. Tentative. “Would you want a Chosen?”

His fingers clench on the railing. “Speculating on impossibilities is a waste of time. I knew exactly what I was sacrificing when I signed the Accords with Amalthea.” His smile holds no warmth as he straightens and looks at me. “Another hour to collect yourself, or can we begin?”

“Let’s get this over with.”

Alexios raises his hands, power crackling around him. The scent of ozone fills the air as lightning skitters over his fingertips.

Then the ground trembles.

I gasp as branches erupt from the frozen landscape—thorns and twisted briars spreading across the ground in a violent surge. Consuming the landscape in blackened branches with silver leaves sharp enough to slice flesh. The branches twist and reach and knit together, forming walls that stretch to the horizon.

A maze. Alexios is forming a maze. The turns are barely visible through the dense thicket, but the entrance is visible just beyond the garden below the balcony.

As abruptly as it began, the ground finally stills.

“The key to Evander’s cell,” Alexios says, lowering his arms, “is at the center.”

I drag my stare from the maze to him. “That’s it, then? I just have to reach the middle?”

“That’s it. The key is yours, if you can claim it.”

I don’t care for that mocking curl of his lips.

“How long?”

“Nightfall. When the stars come out, the labyrinth changes. And even your Wolf’s mark won’t save you then.”

I look at the sun, doing mental math. Seven hours if I’m lucky. Maybe less.

“And when I find it?” I ask, not bothering with “if.”

“Call for me. I’ll be listening.” He studies me, head tilted. “I hope he’s worth it, your Wolf. It would be a shame for you to break for anything less than love.”

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47

BRYONY

ALEXIOS’ MAZE REMINDS me of the Void. The depth, the darkness, the way it pulls you in. There’s clarity at first as every sense sharpens. Then, when you’re yanked deeper, it seems eternal. Endless.

The Void never wanted to give me back when I died. I would float in the dark spaces, wondering if it would keep me. I’d spin and spin with no sense of time.

Like in a labyrinth.

The twisted branches loom overhead, forming a canopy so dense that daylight barely filters through. As the hours pass, the silver-veined leaves seem to shift and elongate. But maybe that’s just in my mind.

Focus. Don’t let it get to you.

But it’s already there. Like the Void, the maze deliberately misleads me deeper. The path ahead of me splits, then converges. Then splits again in a pattern I swear wasn’t there ten seconds ago.

How long have I been walking? Hours? I can’t tell anymore. The sun’s position isn’t clear through the branches, but the shadows keep growing longer. Nothing makes sense in this place. A corridor I passed through minutes ago now leads somewhere else entirely. I endlessly loop and loop, never knowing if I’m closer to the center or right back where I started.

“Just go to the center,” I mutter, pressing my palm against a trunk for balance.

The bark shifts under my touch. Before I can pull away, something slices across my cheek. I reel back with a yelp, my hand flying to my face. My fingers come away wet and red.

What the—?

The thorn jutting from the branch glistens with my blood, and I watch as a drop slides down the barb and falls to the ground.

Then the soil ripples like something beneath it just tasted me.

When the stars come out, the labyrinth changes. And even your Wolf’s mark won’t save you then.

Oh gods. It’s alive. And it’s woken up hungry.

Fuck. Oh fuck fuck fuck.

I stumble back. The thorns now look like teeth—or claws. The branches extend and reach for me.

My heart slams against my ribs as I break into a run.

The paths narrow. Branches bend inward and grasp at my clothes. I duck under one, leap over another. The air thickens. Sweat trickles down my spine.

Something wraps around my ankle, and I hit the ground hard. More tendrils snake around my calves, my thighs, my waist.

“No—”

They start to pull.

The vines constrict, each thorn pushing deep into my skin. I scream and struggle against it. My blood soaks into the soil, and that only makes the vines dig harder. I thrash and kick. The tendrils constrict around my chest.

Think. Think think think. There has to be a way out—

The vines wrap more snugly around my middle and squeeze. A sudden, sickening snap echoes through my body as my rib gives way. I try to scream again, but there’s barely any air left in my lungs.

I can’t move. Can’t breathe. Can’t think through the pain. My whimpers sound like they’re coming from someone else—some pathetic, broken thing I don’t recognize.

I’m jerked sideways. My nails scrape against the dirt as I claw for purchase, for anything to hold on to.

The thorns drag me deeper.

So this is how it ends. After all the deaths I’ve endured, I thought I knew the particular cadence of this unmaking, the way a body fails by degrees. But this? This is different. This death crawls. It savors. The ceremonial knife back home seems almost kind now. What a luxury it was to be broken quickly—

The Claim on my wrist flares.

A heartbeat that’s not my own thunders through me. The ghost of breath across my lips, comforting and achingly familiar.

I latch on to Evander’s pulse, the only solid thing in the shifting dark. Warm. Kind. I pour myself into the unsteady connection, into the scent of him, something to wrap my fists around and haul myself to the surface. To air.

To him.

Because I understand now—love is the thing with teeth. It will take a bite out of you and dare you to bleed. To carve yourself open and cut a vital piece of who you are. When it’s right, the pain becomes something else, something necessary. Like breaking a bone to set it properly.

But it’s worth it. Every bite, every scar, every lesson that got me here.

The memory floods through me—the heat of his skin, the low rumble of his voice. Evander and I crouched among the roses at his tower.

If you want to understand a thing, you have to learn its nature. What makes it feel.

My next exhale shudders out, and I grasp the memory, letting it wash through me and over me.

Breathe out the anger. All it will get you here is bled dry.

I can almost feel the way his body had bracketed mine, the heat and solidity of him. Those hands caging my own.

Prove you’re not a threat, and it might surprise you how eagerly they open up.

The vines contract again, but instead of fighting, I let my muscles go slack and surrender.

Not because I’ve given up.

Because I’ve finally understood.

I focus on the give of the soil beneath my hands. The vines still squirm, slicing into my flesh with every little shift, but I hold myself pliant and passive. Yielding.

I don’t know how long I drift like that. Like I’m in the Void, just waiting to be pulled out. The dark pressing in. Time tick-tick-ticking past as I surrender.

Then something changes. The thorns that punctured my skin begin to ease, then gentle, as if they can sense the fight draining out of me, giving way to something calmer. More centered. Each small breath is a little easier than the last.

“I’m not your enemy,” I murmur. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

For a moment, the vines go still as if they’re listening—and maybe they are. Evander said he spoke to his roses.

“I’m just trying to reach him.” My voice breaks, but I force the words out anyway. “I know you probably don’t give a shit about my tragic little love story, but he’s my—”

The confession lodges behind my teeth. Too small, too feeble a word for this immensity clawing beneath my ribs.

“Everything,” I manage. “He’s everything. And if I have to let you take pieces out of me to get to him, that’s what I’ll do. That’s the bargain.” A shaky inhale. Exhale. Breathe, Bryony. “So do it. Use me up until there’s nothing left. I won’t fight you.”

Nothing happens, just the slow drip of my blood into the hungry soil. I’m sure the maze will swallow me down after all, digest me slowly. But then…

One tendril loosens around my ankle. Another uncoils from my wrist. The sharp points withdraw from my flesh—first my legs, then my arms. The thorns that dug deepest come last, sliding free with reluctance, like they’ll miss the taste of me.

I blink up at the lattice of desiccated branches, sucking in air.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

I manage to lever myself to my hands and knees. Some functioning part of my brain notes the way my arms shake, threatening to give out at any moment. Shock, probably. Blood loss. I don’t have time to catalog the extent of the damage or assess what hurts.

Instead, I claw my way forward because fuck letting Alexios win. I’m so close to the end. Evander is waiting for me in his cell.

I promised I would come back.

You didn’t survive all that to give up now, I snarl at myself. Just a little further. Crawl if you have to.

I’ve earned this.

Ten steps. Twenty. Each inch feels like a mile. My blood leaves a dark trail behind me—proof I was here, proof I didn’t give up. The edges of my vision flicker, but I grit my teeth and shove it back because—

Something glows ahead. It’s such an incongruous sight that I stumble, certain that I’m hallucinating. But no, a wooden box sits nestled among the roots with pale sigils pulsing along its edges.

I all but fall on it. It takes me three tries to flip the latch, my fingers shaking too badly to grip it properly. But finally, finally, the lid creaks open. And there, nestled in a bed of velvet, is a heavy iron key.

I curl my fist around it and shut my eyes in exhaustion.

“Alexios. It’s done.”

For a long moment, there is only the creak of branches and the rustling of the leaves.

Then, a whisper of feathers. A familiar thrum of ancient power.

When I force my eyes open, Alexios towers over me, his wings spread wide and blocking out what little light filters through the skeletal canopy. That burning stare fixes on me.

“Up,” he tells me. Quiet, inexorable.

And gods help me, I obey. I lock my knees and shove to my feet because he commanded it. Because the alternative is the Void.

I choke down the bile at the back of my throat. When the gray recedes and my vision clears, Alexios is still standing there watching me.

“You look like something even the crows wouldn’t pick over. Like a carcass left to bloat in a ditch.”

I spit a mouthful of blood onto the ground. “I hate you. With everything… in me.”

“Good.” He smiles. “That hatred will keep your heart beating when your body wants to quit.”

Alexios scoops me into his arms. The movement jars my injured ribs, and I bite my tongue against a scream. His massive crimson and black wings unfurl with a snap.

The flight passes in a blur of agony and half-consciousness. When we land in the gardens, he sets me down on the palace steps, but keeps one hand on my arm to steady me.

“You’re not done,” he says.

Something in his voice makes me go cold. I struggle to focus on his face. “What… do you mean?”

“You thought finding that key was your test?” His laugh is cruel. “Oh no. That was the prelude. This is the real trial.”

Dread pools in my gut. “What—”

“I want you to walk through my palace, past every single courtier tortured by your family. Every demi whose parents, children, family, and lovers were slaughtered.”

My stomach lurches. “You want everyone to see me broken.”

He grabs my chin, forcing me to meet that burning gaze. “I want them to have a good, long look at what it takes to earn the Wolf.”

“You’re sick.”

“I’m practical.” His thumb traces my jawline. “You’re a Devaliant who tied your soul to a future god-king of Scillari. Everything has a price, Princess. Time to pay up.”

I try to pull away, but his grip is implacable. “Is that all? Or do you want to kick me while I’m down, too?”

“Oh, I want countless things from you, Bryony Devaliant. But right now, I’ll settle for watching you drag yourself through a palace full of gods who would gladly wear your skin as a trophy. They can’t touch you—this Claim forbids it.” He brushes his thumb over Evander’s glowing mark. “But if you fall, you’ll stay down. If you crawl, they’ll watch. And if you’re strong enough to reach the dungeons and turn that key, maybe the Wolf will piece what’s left of you back together if your heart doesn’t give out first.”

He releases me, head cocked. Waiting.

Asshole.

I swallow down every foul insult I’m thinking and jerk my chin in a nod.

“Remember,” he says, “you chose this. Begged for it, even. So don’t you dare waste my time by collapsing in the front hall. Make every step count.”

Then he’s gone in a whisper of dark feathers, leaving me alone and bleeding on his doorstep.

Go. Finish it.

The first step nearly kills me. My legs buckle, and my vision blurs from the pain. The second isn’t much better. But I force my ravaged body forward because I refuse to lose.

The runes on the massive door flare and it swings open on silent hinges. And I’m pathetically grateful I’m spared the indignity of trying to work the handles with my mangled hands.

The entry hall stretches before me, packed with courtiers. Every head turns. They focus on me with varying degrees of disgust and fascination.

I let them look. Let them drink in every laceration, every broken bone. All the fractured parts of me laid bare for their entertainment. Because I’ve made a study of unmaking and contorting myself into whatever grotesque shape is required of me. To be broken on the altar of someone else’s need.

What’s one more flaying, after all this?

Drip. Drip.

My blood makes perfect circles on the white marble. I count steps and breaths. The thud of my heart, the distance to the dungeon stairs. I shut out the whispers, the laughter, the delicate gags, the snide comments. All of it.

Because this is a thing I’ve learned. Sometimes, the only way through a moment is to put your head down and endure it. No one’s coming to help you.

Sometimes, all you can do is keep moving.

“Filthy Devaliant bitch,” someone hisses from my right.

Not Vartenan. Not human. They hate my family name more than anything.

A wet glob of spit lands on my cheek. Then another. And another. Flecking my hair, my shoulders. I keep my eyes forward, jaw clenched, and I keep moving.

The whispers grow to a roar. More spit. More taunts.

“Ten gold pieces says she doesn’t make it to the dungeons,” someone calls out.

No one can touch you, Alexios had said.

Another glob of saliva lands on my neck.

I don’t look. Don’t flinch. I won’t give them the satisfaction of seeing me crack. My vision narrows to the floor in front of me, the next doorway, the next hall, down another corridor. Past more and more eyes burning with hatred.

My legs give out at the top of the spiral staircase leading down to the dungeons. A guard watches me, leaning against the wall, his face bored.

“He won’t want what’s left of you,” he calls after me as I descend.

Fuck. You.

Because I promised. I promised I’d come back.

I collapse and crawl. My hands leave bloody prints on each step. Halfway down, I manage to stand again, and I keep going because the alternative isn’t an option. When I finally reach the bottom, the corridor stretches ahead. Just a few more steps. I can see the door to his cell now.

Ten steps. Five. Three more. One—

“Devaliant.”

I crumple just outside the cell.

“Devaliant.”

Through my unsteady vision, I see his golden wings straining against chains, those amber eyes burning with fury and desperation.

“Bryony. Open it. Open it now.”

Yes. The key. Have to… Have to unlock it.

My fingers shake so badly that it takes three tries to find the keyhole. Metal shrieks as the bolt slides free, and I use the last of my strength to push the door open and crawl inside.

All I hear is the rattle of his chains as consciousness slips away.

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48

EVANDER

THE SHACKLES SEAR my wrists, but I barely register the pain. Bryony’s collapsed just inside my cell—close enough for me to count each shallow rise of her chest.

I catalog her injuries. The damage reads like a battle map: skin shredded, bones crushed, bruises everywhere.

I’ve seen worse on countless battlefields. The Devouring was a brutal education, and I got real familiar with all the ways to pick a person apart. But to see such wounds on her—

“Devaliant. Wake up, sweetheart. Open those pretty eyes for me.”

I track every breath and flutter of her lashes, relieved when she begins to stir. Then her eyes open. For a moment, she stares right through me. Empty.

Recognition flares, and the bond thrums.

“There you are.” I croon the words, low and coaxing. “Come here.”

She crawls toward me, nails scrabbling against the stone floor. A cry wrenches from her as something inside her gives with an audible snap—a rib, maybe more than one. The barest echo of agony ripples through the bond, quickly choked by the power in the shackles. It twists like a knife in my gut.

She collapses into my lap. Her skin is cold. Clammy. The scent of copper is overwhelming, and beneath it—

Demis. I smell other demis all over her, dozens of unique scents. Saliva? What the fuck. I don’t know what test she went through, but I’ll rip Alexios apart with my bare hands for this.

But I shove down the violence because my anger won’t help her right now. My girl needs her Chosen, not her monster.

“Good girl,” I murmur. “Don’t move, okay? Stay still while I fix you up.”

I brace for the backlash as I force power through the siphoning shackles. Searing feedback scorches my veins as the cuffs throttle my magic to a trickle.

Bryony shivers as the feeble pulse flows through her. “Something’s different with your power,” she mumbles. “It’s not as hot.”

“The shackles are strangling it.”

It’s not enough. If I can’t get her stabilized, she’s going to die tonight.

I cast out with my mind, seeking Alexios through the chain that binds us, but the shackles devour the connection.

So I try my brother. His natural sensitivity should compensate for the suppression.

Bastien’s consciousness surges to meet me. What is it?

The words are curt. No curiosity, no urgency.

Take my cuffs off. I have to heal my Chosen before she bleeds out in my lap.

The link freezes over. Hardens.

No. You know the bargain’s terms. The cuffs stay until she completes the trials.

Bryony shudders against me, each shallow inhale rattling. I’m ready to tear this palace apart.

Listen to me very carefully, you heartless asshole. My rage bleeds into the connection. She’s barely breathing. So either Alexios lets me put her insides back where they belong, or I’ll tear out his intestines and make him fucking gargle them.

A beat.

Graphic, Bastien says mildly. The shackles stay, but I’ll uncuff you from the wall. You can play nurse in your room where it’s warm. Take it or leave it.

I exhale harshly through my nose. Every instinct is screaming to keep pushing, to shove at Bastien’s frozen apathy until it cracks. But I don’t have time to wrangle him when Bryony’s lips are turning blue.

Fine, I snarl down the link. Get down here.

“Just keep breathing for me a little longer.” I kiss Bryony’s temple. “Can you do that for me?”

A thin thread of assent drifts through the bond, more sensation than articulation, but I’ll take it.

I count the seconds. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty—

Bastien’s steps ring out, and then he fills the cell doorway, obsidian eyes flicking dispassionately over Bryony. I can practically hear the clicking of that razor-edged mind as he turns her chances over like an abacus.

“Her surviving the night is slim,” he says. Cold, unaffected. “Ten percent at best.”

I love my brother. Really, I do. But sometimes I fucking hate him.

“Then move your ass,” I say sharply.

He enters the cell, and his hands close over the chains tethering me to the wall. Turquoise sparks dance over the metal, the ancient wards straining against his command. With a grating shriek, they finally snap, and the restraints fall away.

I push to my feet, gathering Bryony to my chest. Her ragged gasp frays another few threads of my unraveling control. Has she always been this small? This breakable?

Bastien leads us out of the dungeons. I shut out everything—the opulence of the palace, the courtiers glancing curiously at us, the reminder of their scents all over my Chosen. I shield Bryony from prying eyes with my wings as we ascend to the upper levels.

By the time we reach my rooms, my grip on our bond is the only thing standing between her and the Void. I’m pouring magic into the link and fighting the shackles with every damned step.

Bastien wrenches open the chamber doors, moving aside for me to stride through. I head straight for the massive bed and settle against the headboard, careful not to jostle Bryony too much as I cradle her against my chest.

An agonized keen escapes her.

“Shhh. I know. I know it hurts.” I rock us both, sending pulse after pulse of power into her, knitting up the worst of the internal bleeding. “I’ve got you. Just breathe through it for me.”

I glance at Bastien. He’s leaning against the threshold, bored and blank as a marble statue.

With a pulse of power, he produces a new length of chain. “Don’t fight me.” His shadows twine through the links, forging the magic that will contain me. “I’d hate to have to gag you, but I will.”

I meet that void-dark stare and nod.

He winds the chains around my upper arms and secures them to the headboard. The metal bites into my skin, thrumming with his magic, but I just shove down the pained hiss. Bryony makes a quiet, wounded sound, and it’s suddenly the easiest thing in the realms to sublimate my discomfort. To relegate it to some distant corner of my mind.

“You gave her my daggers,” Bastien says. I hear the accusation—a ripple in that frozen sea of apathy. “She had the audacity to ask me to retrieve them.”

I push another healing pulse into my Chosen’s body before responding. “She won them fair and square. Well, most of them. One was a gift.”

The air thickens, shadows swelling at the room’s edges like gathering smoke. The pressure of my brother’s power crawls across my skin and burrows—deep and dark and devouring.

I ride out the wave. Centuries of exposure build up a tolerance to Bastien’s unique brand of brutality.

“Next time you’re inclined to barter away our history for a piece of ass,” he says, so soft it would be easy to mistake for gentleness if I couldn’t see the rage simmering in his black stare, “leave my weapons out of it.”

Then he yanks on the chains in a sharp jerk, and the links snap taut. My arms are wrenched above my head, my back slamming into the headboard. I give a pained hiss.

On anyone else, it might be a tantrum. On my brother, it’s as close to a sulk as he ever comes.

My Chosen stirs. I soothe her with another careful stream of power, grinding my teeth against the siphoning cuffs cinching tight around my reserves.

It leaves me light-headed. A gray haze settles at the edges of my vision.

“She nearly died for me today,” I point out once the static clears. “I’d say that earns her a few blades.”

I stare down at Bryony, counting her labored breaths. Allowing myself three heartbeats of incandescent fury, three heartbeats to imagine crushing Alexios’ skull between my hands.

Then I lock it away. Recenter myself in the weight of my Chosen, broken but breathing in my lap.

“If I get the Devaliant’s weapons,” Bastien says, “it doesn’t mean I approve of her and you.”

A laugh escapes me. “Damn me, but I can’t wait until someone comes along and cracks open that frozen wasteland you call a heart. I’ll enjoy every second of watching you lose your shit.”

Bastien doesn’t so much as blink, but the temperature plummets another ten degrees. “Unlikely. But given an infinite timeline, I suppose anything is possible.” He turns toward the door. “Try not to choke on your arrogance before she finishes martyring herself for you.”

“She needs new clothes,” I call after him. “Let the servants know.”

“Enjoy being chained to the bed.”

“Love you too.”

The door snicks shut.

In the silence, there’s only the rasp of Bryony’s breathing, the drum of her heart against my chest. Pain brackets her mouth. I measure each shift against me, each half-muffled whimper, and feed her the dregs of my magic in careful, measured pulses. Knitting together the splintered places, soothing the hurts.

Healing is delicate work. I’d barely had time to master it as an Eternal before the war started, but I always struggled with the complexity of it. The balance of using power to mend and soothe rather than rend and burn. It feels clumsy, this language of tenderness. The syllables are strange after so many centuries of knowing only carnage.

But I learned it for her.

When Bryony’s lashes finally flutter open, I slump against the headboard in relief. “There you are. Thought I’d lost you for a minute.”

“You know I’m too stubborn to die.” Her voice sounds raw, so I push a little power into her vocal cords to soothe the ache.

“One of your best qualities,” I tell her.

She’s quiet for a long moment. “Evander?”

“Hmm?”

“Can you… Can you use the deeper healing for the rest? The kind that feels good. I want it the way it’s meant to be.”

There’s an unbearable vulnerability in the request. The trust of laying down her armor when she’s weakest. How many ways can you unravel a god, I wonder? Rip out all the rotting viscera, scoop out the fetid snarls of him, and fill the void with softness and grace.

What a dangerous thing, to hand a wolf the knife and trust he won’t cut. That he’ll mend instead of mangle.

“Okay,” I tell her. “Settle against me since I can’t put my hands on you. I’m going to need you to help me out of my shirt first, all right? The more skin contact we have, the easier this will go.”

Bryony shifts in my lap, reaching for the fastenings between my wings, making quick work of them. Her hands map the skin she’s uncovering. Tracing over my abs, my pecs, with a deliberate sort of slowness that borders on reverent.

Absolute menace, this girl.

“Enough teasing. Lean against me and let me work.”

She nuzzles her head against my shoulder.

I rest my cheek against her hair and just… breathe. Calm and steady. It’s harder to reach for my power. The shackles have choked it down to guttering embers, but I still feel the spark. It takes more concentration to stoke it higher, hotter, to turn it into something I can use.

Fire sears me with the first surge I push into Bryony. I clench my teeth through the wave and shove the pain down deep. That’s a hurt to deal with when she’s not counting on me.

Because what’s one more lashing for my Chosen?

So I flood every corner of myself with light and heat, with the intent to heal, to soothe, to pleasure—

My girl relaxes as I work, giving herself over to it completely. Letting me in. Slow and measured, feeding power into her veins. Her lungs. The secret shadowed places carved out by hurt. I trail heat and honey-gold light over her hurts in a reverent touch. Sealing split skin. Soothing the contusions, learning the shape and texture of each as I coax it to fade. Easing the aches.

I drag more power up from that bottomless well inside me and let it sink through layers of dermis and hypodermis, encouraging sluggish blood to reroute. Coaxing splintered bone to fuse, ligaments and cartilage to stitch back together. The internal bleeding takes more concentrated effort.

My magic floods the bond. Stroking, igniting, leaving shuddering ecstasy in its wake. Her breath catches as pleasure winds her up. Each rock and grind of her hips against my cock stoking the fire building low in my gut.

There’s a fierce sort of pride in pushing her to this point. A savage triumph in the knowledge that every shudder and moan is because of me. I did that. I made her feel that.

Bryony throws her head back as she shatters. A choked cry escapes her lips.

“That’s it.” I brush the words against her temple. “Ride it out for me.”

Seeing her lost to bliss, to the wildfire of my magic moving inside her, is nearly enough to undo me. The most exquisite torture.

I could lose myself in this. In watching her and knowing I’m the only one who’s given her this pleasure. I’m the only one who’s seen the expression on Bryony Devaliant’s face when she lets go.

Minutes go by as she shudders through the aftershocks. Her now healed skin sheened in sweat, gilded by the dying firelight.

“I can’t believe you.” Her words slur together. “You were holding out on me.”

I grin. “The offer was always on the table. Not my fault you never took me up on it.”

A soft huff of laughter. “So, how much of your power does Alexios’ leash usually let you access?”

“Usually? About half my full strength. But with these?” The chains clink as I rattle them. “Ten percent, if I’m being generous.”