The glass wall Lunelle had kept him behind shattered into a billion glittering shards, crumbling across the shoreline as she moved into him. His eyes widened at her motion—he’d been certain she would stay on her side of their carefully maintained line until one of them finally Descended, but a single breath across it was enough to unwind every tortured knot in his muscles.
She’d imagined kissing him to be a slow, noble pursuit.
She’d imagined he’d need coaxing from that stronghold within him.
She’d imagined his regal posture would require some undoing to dissolve beneath her aching palms in ways Arcas never needed.
She’d been so blatantly, brilliantly wrong.
There wasnothingsoft about kissing him. This was a dive off the cliffs beside them—a plunge straight to her death, broken by icy waves that claimed the air from her lungs. Fingers clutched at his cloak, desperate to have him closer, to have him consume every thought she wished she didn’t have.
“Lu,” he gasped as her lips untangled from his briefly, just long enough to catch any breath she could. “Lunelle.”
She shook her head, grasping his face in her cool touch, desperate to hold any piece of him he’d allow.
“Please,” she begged, her breath hot against his neck. “Just give me one moment of you, one single moment, and I’ll never ask you for anything else, I swear it.”
Two ceaseless pools of jade bore into her, wrestling with what a better woman might do. As his gemstone gaze searched hers, Lunelle determined there was no better woman in all thirteen courts she’d aspire to be than the one between his palms.
“Just one moment,” she whispered again, a prayer on the sea breeze whipping beyond the cliffs.
Perhaps they could haul themselves over the jagged edges now and be rid of all of this torment. Or slip into the Rift and bang on the Nether Gate to beg sanctuary. He fought every stretch of the Tether between them as he leaned away from her, his voice hardly audible over the crashing waves below.
He brushed a tear away from the crest of Lunelle’s cheek as he spoke.
“If I give you one more moment, I fear I’ll give every damned one of them to you, Princess. Every single breath between here and my Descent would begin and end with your name. Every step I took from now until my boots crumble to dust would be in service of following you, and you alone.” Mirquios tensed beneath her touch, as if she were truly an Ice Queen, chilling him to the bone. “If I give you one more solitary second, Lunelle, I will insist you lay claim to any remaining moments I am allotted.”
Her heart swelled with salt and sea air, racing to keep up with the words falling from his lips.
“You will insist?” she asked, unable to choke the bittersweet ribbon of tears slipping from her eyes.
“I will,” he whispered.
Lunelle battled every voice that warned her to pull back her plea, to unsay the words that begged such eternal notions.
“Then insist,” she breathed.
A fractured laugh escaped his throat, tainted by the knowledge that no amount of insistence could untangle this mess.
“I insist, Lunelle,” he said, his arms wrapping around her waist. “I’d insist in the face of Pluto himself.”
“Gods,” she sighed, letting herself press against him for what would likely be the last time—hadto be the last time. “This is true hell.”
“At least we’re here together,” he said quietly, feathering a kiss against her lips.
Lunelle rested her head against his chest, listening to the sputtering of his heart against his ribs. His chin perched atop her head, and they stood there, frozen, unable to move out of the only moment they could guarantee.
Dread poured from the back of her mind into her lungs, the face of a beloved sister filling her vision and flooding her with sickening guilt.
“We cannot be friends, Mirquios,” she said quietly.
“No.” He swallowed, the pulse in his throat pushing against her temple.
“We cannot be strangers,” she whispered.
“Never.”
Her ears heated, prickling with that moment that comes before one does something truly stupid.
