She touched the sigils on his face. When he gave a shake of his head, she moved her fingers to the seal etched onto his chest instead. In the mark she saw her history—all the men who had made her, an old and illustrious bloodline that had defined Mehr, like it or not. In the mark she saw herself.

“I vow to hold these vows higher, more sacred than any vows that have been forced from us,” she said. She drew him closer still, the bed firm beneath her back, his skin warm and glowing with sweat and life. “I vow that I am your tribe and your clan and … I vow that I choose to belong to you.”

He touched her seal-marked skin in return, a back-and-forth touch, so tender it nearly brought tears to her eyes. “We belong to each other,” he said. “That is a true vow, Mehr.”

They touched each other compulsively, curiously. She learned the language of his body and her own, as new and strange and holy as a rite, but one that needed no name, no laws. The brightness inside her grew as whispered vows gave way entirely to touch. She was sure, so sure of him. The feel of him against her, inside her—even the clumsiness of it all, the brief pain, the heat of his breath on the slope of her shoulder—all of it only made her more sure.

I vow that you’re my choice, the only right choice I’ve ever made, she thought, feeling the vow bloom open in her heart, red as blood. No vow, no matter what it compels from me, will be more important than the one I’ve made to love you.

Maybe she spoke the words. Maybe she didn’t. But in the dying lantern light, after his sigils had dimmed and he lay beside her in the growing glow of dawn, she looked into his eyes and saw the light in them, the softness of it. He knew her, heart and soul. He knew.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Mehr lay next to Amun as the dawn lightened the sky. Amun was quiet. She could feel his eyes on her, drinking her in.

Her body felt different. Warm, wrung out with trauma and with joy. The sigil on her chest was burning, stretching its roots deep under her skin as it shifted and changed with the force of a vow made permanent. Her fate was sealed into her skin now.

She didn’t think of Hema, of Arwa, of anyone or anything at all. She listened to Amun breathe. She thought of the cage that had closed in around them.

They could no longer use the rite to try to win their freedom. All their escape plans—the sigils they’d strung together, the knowledge they’d carefully gleaned, the map they’d redrawn in kohl … it was all a waste. They were utterly bound, by body and by soul.