Page 189 of May: Bloom & Bane

I crush her against me, a tendril of shadow winding up her spine to anchor her there.

“I’m here, angel,” I murmur into her hair. “I’m not going anywhere. I have you⁠—”

I breathe her in. Beneath the peony, honey and the sweet bloom of our daughter—I smell Sage. Rain and cucumber, woven into her skin and the slick still cooling on her thighs. He’s all over her. He’s in her.

A growl builds in my chest, frost spidering across my ribs.

I went into the dark, and the world kept turning without me. She was claimed—and I wasn’t there. I felt none of it. I have days of nothing, and he has this, the scent of her soaked all the way through. The nightmare rears its ugly head: replaced. You were gone, and you were not missed.

“Ashán.” Eden pulls back, her eyes wet. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy to be home?”

“He had you.” My skelva flex against her back. My eyes linger on the marks down her throat and chest. “While I was buried, screaming for you—he had you. All of you.”

Her eyes widen. She reaches up, her warm hands framing my jaw.

“Ashán, look at me.” Her voice softens. “He didn’t take anything from you.”

“He’s all over you, Eden.” Fire licks at the back of my throat as my wing flares wide. “I smell him, and I smell what you gave him while I was rotting in the dark.”

“I was saving his life!” she cries out, new tears spilling down her face. “He was wilting, Ashán. And this was the only way to save you both.”

The growl falters in my chest.

“You weren’t able to come back on your own.” Her thumb strokes the seam where my bone meets his flesh. “The níva was draining Sage’s lifeforce, and it was dragging you down with it. I didn’t even know why he was sick until Therael came. The only way to close the loop, to ground the excess of magic… was that.” Her breath hitches. “And do you know why?”

She sniffles and drops her hands from my face. I catch them and guide them back to where they held me.

“Sage and I were finally having a moment after you left, and then I saw a piece of your shadow in the mirror, and I completely neglected him to search for you—I always look for you, Ashán.”

Another tear slips down her face, and my heart cracks.

The jealousy, the frost, all of it dies in an instant.

No. Not this. Anything but this. The last time she cried, it sent me slithering into a grave I dug myself for over a week. Days of nothing but emptiness because I couldn’t bear to be the thing that hurt her.

“No, no, no—don’t,” I rasp, my pointed fingertips catching her tears before they can fall. “Don’t cry. Please. I can’t—ash’kaela, I can’t bear it when you cry. I’ll take it back, all of it. I’m not angry. I was never angry, just—please stop crying.”

A shadow tendril cups her jaw. Another wipes her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I breathe. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Just don’t cry. I’ll do anything.”

“You won’t leave again?” she whispers.

“Never,” I vow. “I swear it on our daughter. I will never leave you behind again.”

She melts into me, her bare skin pressing against the cold plane of my chest.

“I missed you,” she whispers. “Ten days you were gone, Ashán. I talked to you every single night, even though I wasn’t sure you could hear me.”

“I heard you. Every word until the dream dust.”

“I missed the way you touch me,” she rasps, her hips squirming over my shadow.

The smoky tendril answers her, thickening beneath her, curling to cradle the shifting weight of her hips. A shudder rolls through me as her slick warmth soaks into it. I can feel how much she’s aching already. It’s the strangest, most maddening thing to be the darkness she’s writhing on and to feel it as though her body is moving directly against the most sensitive part of me.

“Careful, ash’kaela,” I rasp, my skelva sliding from her lower back to rest over the crease of her thighs. “Ten days of starvation… and my mind is full of nothing but depravity and you.”

“What kind of depravity, rahnové?”