Flipping onto my back, looking up at a male at the end pulling his shirt up over his head while I part my legs and touch myself—desperate and wanting.
Needing.
At the sight of his sweat-dappled body, I release a throaty groan, close my eyes. Sink my fingers inside myself in an effort to sate the hunger that never quells.
Not when it comes to him.
The pallet dips with his weight, his hefty presence dropping close—electrifying my skin, making my heart pump in hard, rapid beats.
A kiss is planted on the stretched slope of my neck. A nip below my ear that sends shivers scuttling through my body and almost unravels me upon my fingers.
His lips are at my lobe, coarse words poured into me:
“What do you want, Elluin?”
“You.” I turn my head, open my eyes. Get lost in Kaan’s ember gaze as a smile fills my cheeks. “Forever.”
The vision loosens its hold on me, and my knees buckle. I fall to the ground amongst a litter of feathers, gasping for breath that won’t come, hands gnarled into claws that drag at my chest. As I realize with soul-crushing finality the reason I’ve been drawn to this point since the moment I opened the shutters.
This place isn’t the relic of somebody else’s love …
It’s ours.
This slumber, Kaan played a song I recognized. The same song Mah and Pah used to sing to me when I was sick.
I sang along until my words got choked by the first tears I’ve been able to cry since I brought Haedeon back from Netheryn. They didn’t spill like a soft snowfall, but like a storm lashing the windowpanes.
I cried for Mah and Pah. For Haedeon and Allume.
I cried for Slátra.
I cried for things that were taken from me, and for the voice I’m not allowed to use.
I didn’t realize Kaan had stopped playing until he scooped me up, tucked me against his chest, and held me so tight I could barely breathe, his strong body absorbing every one of my sobs.
It reminded me of the way Pah picked up Mah when she was crying in the snow. The way he carried her back inside where it was light and warm …
For some reason, that just made me cry harder.
The heavy smoke haze makes the sun look like a pink smudge, a quiet reminder that this village was a battlefield earlier this dae.
Now it’s a graveyard.
We step around the blistered corpse of a fallen colk yet to be dragged into the pit, and I clear my throat.
Chief Thron keeps my pace as we walk past bouldered homes, some reforged in the past few hours, though shattered glass still litters the ground at their base. Others are black from where dragonflame fired the stone, the glass from their windows now puddled on the ground.
Solidified.
Uprooted trees lie across the path like dead bodies, their foliage withered or singed, roots still clinging to slabs of ground that lifted with their upheaval. Folk cut into the trunks with long bronze saws, hacking them into pieces small enough to be used as firewood or other supplies.
“We have lost much,” Thron says, a somber hitch to his deep voice. “But we’d have lost much more had you not arrived when you did.”
Had I not slaughtered his dragon.
I grunt, stepping over a scatter of crushed ginku fruit, the bright-yellow flesh browning beneath the sun’s harsh rays. Souring, just like this feeling in my gut.
We move into the open, past fields of tawny crops that have been gouged, many plants uprooted from the skirmish that took place before I was able to lure Blóm into the sky again. Toward the rolling hills that sit as a backdrop for the village of Rambek, like great crouching beasts.
I could’ve done it here, but I wanted to give him somewhere private to curl up since it was clear he wasn’t going to make it into the sky.
As it was, he didn’t manage to curl up at all. Didn’t solidify.
Just died, and will eventually rot where he lies.
I clear my throat, trying to scrub the image from my mind, gaze sliding to the clay silo—once tall and strong, now shattered. A phase’s worth of grain spilled across the scorched ground, dampened by the downpour that came just after the beast was slain. As though Rayne herself was crying over the loss of the majestic Sabersythe Rygun slung to the base of a gully, releasing his own tortured shriek that rivaled the howling wind.
The ground had rattled just as much as my fucking bones.
I pull my lungs full, the air thick with the stench of death, smoke, and despair. “I will have barrels of grain shipped to the nearby port,” I offer, watching some of the village folk move about the fields, snapping nearly ripe heads off the top of cormah fronds and gathering them in carts. Salvaging what they can. “As well as some slow-perishing produce to tide your folk over until you can replenish your crops.”