He can’t even speak anymore. I want him. I can want him now, and the feeling is like flying. Like throwing off something incredibly heavy. I can take what I want, for myself. For my own happiness. And so it’s my turn to kiss his neck, beneath his ear, gently moving up to the shell of it and whispering, “All you had to do was ask nicely.”

The soft noise he makes at my words, the sudden breath he sucks in—it’s like music. The best music I’ve ever heard, all the finest quartets in Vetris paling to nothing in comparison. I’ve plucked a string in him and he sings and I do it again with a whisper, the better to hear him with.

“I’m yours.”

It’s a blur. It’s a blur of very pointed moments, sensations—his mouth on me everywhere, so furiously hot and eager; his hardness against my hand; our mouths in and out of each other’s, dipping and scraping like two valkerax in death dives. The smell of his skin, no, our skin. This belongs to us. To me and no one else. Not the hunger. Not Cavanos. Not the war waiting outside, not the world. There’s that moment, that moment, and we’re connected, and I understand what it truly means to have a heart, finally, when we’re moving together as one, the sea breeze and the silly little cot and the two of us making it happen, together, making this moment in time all our own.

Forever.

22

22

BLOOD
AND
PROMISES

There’s always this strange unspoken opinion that floats around Cavanosian society, and it’s that one’s first time changes a girl. That lying with a loved one in the carnal sense is transformative, somehow. I wish I could report that this was accurate, but alas—it barely changed me at all. It really just made me more, well, me.

“Is it hard to eat?” Malachite drawls at dinner, a fish-and-rice affair of the Black Archives’ mess hall. “With a permanent shit-eating grin on your face?”

I grin even wider and bat my eyelashes at him across the table. “I wouldn’t know.”

Malachite rolls his eyes and looks at Lucien. “You’ve created a monster.”

“I can hardly claim to take credit.” Lucien smiles contentedly into his water glass. “When she’s worked so hard on it herself.”

His black-glass eyes catch mine over the candlelight, knowing and full of himself and I can’t stand it one second more and neither can he, apparently, because we both stand and dump our trays with some muttered excuse to Malachite. The halls that were buzzing an hour ago are now empty, everyone at dinner, but an unfortunate (or should I say fortunate?) silver-robed polymath rounds the corner and catches Lucien pressing me against the wall. Nothing lewd, of course. Just simple kisses. All over my body.