Page 45 of May: Bloom & Bane

The wind dies. The dahlias freeze. Even her heartbeat seems to pause between two beats, the whole meadow holding its breath for a single word I’ve never even heard before.

Inside me, the voice—the rasping, snarling, demanding presence that has whispered through every dark hour since she woke up—goes utterly silent.

“What…” My voice cracks. “What did you say?”

Her brow pinches. Her lips part.

“I…” She blinks at me. “I don’t know.”

She called for me, he whispers inside my mind.

Everything in my body goes cold.

My hand stills on her thigh.

Another male’s name. In her mouth. While she lies beneath me wearing nothing but moonlight and the last scrap of her nightgown—every instinct I have rises with its teeth bared, hunting for the thing that dared put its name on her tongue, ready to unmake it the way I nearly unmade the Horsemen⁠—

Except.

The name came from inside.

She called for me, the voice says again, and it isn’t gloating. It’s soft and shaken.

“Sage?” Eden’s hand brushes over my chest. Her heartbeat is wild under my palm.

“That name,” I rasp. “You’ve never heard it before?”

“No. It was just… there.”

She stares up at me, her thumb slowly stroking over the place where the leaves are spreading across my chest.

“That’s how all of them arrive.” I take her hand from my chest and press her palm flat over my sternum, over the place where the words live. “Saevúra. Luváel. Ílyara. I never learned them, Eden. I reach, and they’re simply there—waiting inside of me like seeds under snow. Every word my soul has ever handed me has been about you.” I swallow. “And now your soul has handed you a word about me.”

“Ashán,” she says again, and deep beneath my ribs something turns over. “You feel that?”

“I do,” I admit.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know what it is. I only know that everything that comes from that place—” I press her palm harder against my chest, “—has only ever loved you.”

Her eyes widen.

“Then let him stay,” she whispers, pulling her nightgown the rest of the way off and tossing it into the sea of darkness beside us.

She’s bare. Completely naked beneath me.

Moonlight catches on the curves of her breasts, the dip of her waist, and the soft plane of her stomach.

Flowers bloom around us so fast they begin to cover Eden.

I can do nothing but stare at the most beautiful thing to ever offer itself to a beast like me.

“Ílyara,” I choke out, my hand trembling where it rests against her knee. “You’re perfect. And I’m⁠—”

“Mine,” she says, and the certainty in her voice balms the doubt blooming in my mind.

“Neeth,” I breathe. I have always been neeth.”