Page 47 of Ravished By the Revenant

“Me.” I gesture at myself, at the grayed skin, the hollow eye, the ribs, the ruin. “You have seen all of it. You have seen the bone.”

Clara rolls her eyes. “I’ve licked some of the bone, Aldric, keep up.”

“You love me.” I say it a third time, because perhaps my ears have stopped working, finally decayed.

“I do. And she knew I would.” Clara shakes her head slowly. “She saw you coming, years before you came. She could have stopped you. Killed you. Instead, she let her village burn and turned you into a revenant, because in every future where you died, I die alone. She preserved you for me, Aldric.”

I stop listening. I will untangle her words later, in the days to come, or years, or decades. Because only one thing is important right now, and she loves me.

I cross the courtyard.

“Aldric? Are you—your face is doing something⁠—”

I pick her up, and her arms wrap around me, and her legs come around my waist, and I kiss her.

I kiss her like I’m drowning and she has the air I need to breathe. Her hands fist in my hair, and she’s laughing and crying into my mouth, and I taste salt and strawberries and the entire rest of my existence. I kiss her until she is breathless and boneless and makes that small sound against my lips that I have hoarded like treasure since the first night.

Only when I finally lift my head do I notice my surroundings.

To our left and right is the Black Forest and behind us... The gate stands behind us. Behind us. The courtyard, the keep, all of it is behind us, and I’m standing on ground my feet have not touched since the Holy Roman Empire held it.

“Clara,” I breathe.

“Mm?” she hums against my neck.

“We are outside.”

Clara goes still against me. Turns her head. Looks at the gate, the keep, the forest surrounding us.

“Huh,” she says. “So we are.”

26

CLARA

My stomach announces itself somewhere between the fifth kiss and the sixth, a growl loud enough that a bird takes off from the nearest fir.

Aldric pulls back and raises an eyebrow at my midsection. “Your body has the timing of a siege drum.”

“My body has been through a lot today. Visions. Declarations. Gate-based cardio.” I glance at the sky, already turning purple behind the treetops. “Also it’s getting dark, and I’m not spending my first night of freedom being eaten by whatever lives in the forest.”

“Wolves,” he offers helpfully. “Boar. Possibly descendants of my hunting dogs, gone feral.”

I roll my eyes at him. “Great. Love that for us. Inside.”

Aldric carries me halfway across the courtyard before I make him put me down, and even then, he tucks me into his side like he’s afraid the curse will change its mind and snatch one of us back.

And that’s when the thought slithers in.

What if it’s not me he’s afraid of losing?

It follows me through the atrium, past the roses, into the kitchen, where Aldric rolls his sleeves and starts pulling things from the pantry. I sit on the edge of the big worktable and watch his forearms do their usual crimes, and the thought keeps circling like Shmoo around a fish basket.

He said he loves me. He shouted it across a courtyard, loud enough to scare the crows. And I believe he believes it.

But I’m also the first woman he’s touched in centuries. The only living human to walk through his gate since before color TV. Of course he loves me. A starving man loves the first meal put in front of him. That’s not a compliment to the meal. That’s just hunger.

And now the gate is open. The whole world is out there, and it’s a world full of women who aren’t me, women who haven’t spent days arguing with him about consent and freedom. What if he walks out there and realizes his sample size was one?