Page 105 of Burn of the Everflame

Instead of the crushing sorrow that came next, my thoughts wandered to what could be. What if I told him about the bond? What if I didn’t have to die? What if I could wake up every morning to his hands on my skin and his quiet, brilliant smile?

My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, my body pressing closer. Beneath my palm, I felt his heart begin to pound. I breathed him in, my senses savoring his woodsy musk. Gods, I’d forgotten how he smelled of the forest. That was where we belonged, not pampered in a palace or shivering in a tent.

The hand on his chest drifted higher until I found skin. My fingers grazed his throat as it rumbled with a dark, hungry noise.

“This is what you really wanted that night, isn’t it?” he murmured. “You didn’t want me to leave. You wanted this.”

His hand curved around the nape of my neck, fingers threading through my hair and forcing my lips closer. I arched into him with a quiet whimper that was both plea and protest.

“Tell me,” he growled.

Still too much of a coward to say it aloud, I managed a nod.

He placed a kiss at the corner of my lips. “You wanted this.” His mouth roamed, pressing to the soft spot beneath my ear, then again to the column of my throat. “And this.” His hips rolled into mine, his hard arousal impossible to miss. “Say it, Diem.”

“Yes,” I rasped. “All of it.”

Bone-shuddering relief flooded over the one-sided bond. “Then why send me away? Was it something I did?”

I shook my head.

“Something with the sword?” I tensed, and he took it for the admission it was. “You put your blood on the blade. You said something was inside it.”

Not something, I thought with a shudder. Someone.

My eyes opened to find him watching me. His grip on me tightened, like he could tell I was an inch from fleeing and a breath from giving in.

“You spoke with the Kindred, didn’t you?” he asked. “They told you about the Everflame—about how the godstone was made.”

My lips parted, the truth on my tongue. Maybe it was selfish to drag him into my misery, but I was sick of bearing this secret alone.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“They told you how to stop Ophiucae.”

“Yes.” With each confession, the burden I’d been carrying began falling from my shoulders. “He’s not the son of Omnos—he is Omnos. He’s a Kindred. He’s been trapped in that cell for thousands of years. He never gave up his immortality like the others.”

Luther’s furrowed stare drifted as he worked through the consequences of my revelation. “So he can’t die.”

My heart wrenched. “He can . . . just not by normal means.”

“The sword. You need that to kill him. That’s why they gave it to you.”

I swallowed. “Yes. It’s the only way.”

For a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, he didn’t move, and he didn’t speak. My own emotions were so conflicted, I couldn’t begin to make sense of his. I wondered if he’d figured out the awful truth—if he was warring with the same rage and grief consuming me.

And then he looked back at me . . . and his face brightened into a broad, triumphant smile.

“I knew it.” He held out a palm, where a spark of light flickered to life. His eyes lifted to the sky. “Thank you, Blessed Mother. Forgive me for allowing my faith to waver.”

He was thanking her?

I was too stunned to resist as he wrapped his arms around me with a deep, joyful laugh. “I prayed for years that Lumnos would come back and save this world from what it has become, but she did something so much better.” He cupped his hands around my face, his smile heartbreakingly wide. “She sent us you. You’re going to stop him, and you’re going to save us all.”

I’d never seen him this happy. Not when I won the Challenging, not when we’d reunited, not even when I’d told him I loved him. The pure elation surging through the bond crashed into my despair, oil and water tumbling together in a futile attempt to unite.

“Luther,” I choked, “you don’t understand.”