“Destroys me? How so?”
“What if your god rejects you because of this?”
What will your kapitän whore think? You, all damaged like this.
“What if your god rejects you,” I’m talking too fast, spiraling, “and what if mine one day can’t save you? We can’t pretend gods haven’t betrayed their charges in the past. What will we do when mine leads us to ruin and yours has turned his back on you? What will you do when”—I gasp, but he’s still holding my face, catching my tears on his thumbs—“when you realize you’ve followed me down a path that leads to nowhere but desolation? You say you know what you’re doing. But I don’t think you do, not truly. Not—”
His turn to kiss me silent.
It isn’t a gentle kiss. Not his usual tenderness, love spoken in touch. He kisses me now like he’s fighting for dominance; I kiss him like I’m afraid this will be the last time, even though we’ve had dozens of times now.
He’s bruising and vicious,and his aggression throws me back, stumbling across the grass, the foliage of the forest. He lifts me, locks my legs around his hips, spins us both so my back slams to the tree now. I’m aware even more of the lack of cloth in this outfit, legs bare where they belt his waist, shoulders and arms scraping the tree through the gauzy material.
“Friederike Kirch.” My name is a reprimand from him that shoots down my spine like lightning, miring me in place between the hard planes of his body and the rough bark of the tree. “If either god,anygod, abandons us, leaves us to wallow in some abyss or drift through whatever trials alone, then I will be there, with you. Because that is what I have chosen,thatis what this bonding ceremony means to me: that all the forces of this world could turn their backs on us, but I won’t forsake you.”
A softer kiss. A promise.
I whimper, a hollow pulse of unraveling.
“I won’t leave you,” Otto tells me, and he is swearing to me now, trailing featherlight promises across my cheekbone. “I am yours more than I belong to any god or cause.”
“And I’m yours,” I manage through my tight throat, through the hum rekindling in my blood.
Otto makes a grunt of confirmation. I feel the rumble of it, but I buck against him, and he hisses.
“Say it,” I demand.
“You’re mine,” he says instantly, like the words were there already, pressing against me even more, until there is no air, no space, nothing but him.
“Now, Liebste,” he tells me, and that spark in his eyes is back, raging anew, a full bonfire on its own that incinerates me, captivates me. “I will take care of you.”
It isn’t a question.
I could fight him again. I could push for control, and give instead of take, but taking is giving with him, and I need, on some primal, disastrous level, for him to do this, to be the one to seize control.
I nod. I can’t speak. Not anymore. There are no words, no tears; I am hollowed by my admission and my panic, and I think this is what the purification rituals meant to do: scrape away the murkiness so there is only room for light.
Otto grabs me off the tree and lays us both back on the ground, the spring-soft down of the forest cushioning our fall.
All of his earlier tenderness is gone. He seems peeled back, but where my peeling back is in exhausted surrender, his is frantic action, and he moves across me, alternating kisses and bites over my skin until I’m strung taut.
He brings me back to my body. With his fingers, I am only vibrations. With his tongue, I am only goosebumps. With his lips, I am only skin.
He tosses aside my skirts, spreads my thighs, and there is no reverence, just his mouth, hungry and demanding. My head rocks back against the undergrowth, spine bowing off the ground, fingers tearing into the plants, the dirt, until the air smells of new life and greenery.
And then he’s there with me, pressing into me without pretense, and I know we both feel the difference tonight. This is no drowsy devotion, no slow build, no worship of skin and noise—it is fast and desperate and exactly what all my mismatched facets need.
I am his, and he is mine, and our lips find each other, sloppy and wet and swollen.
The bonfire was meant to burn the last of our impurities away, and if that’s what fire does, then all the nights with him should have turned me to crystal glass by now.
My awareness widens. The little meadow we’d found is now burstingwith plants, herbs—thistle and nettle—that have no business growing in early spring, and I feel the remnant of wild magic tingling along my veins.
I’ll care about that later. If at all. Let this byproduct linger, let this one bit of magic remain, proof and witness.
Whatever we will have to face—whatever crusade Holda sees fit to shove us into, standing up to the council or changing the world—the one thing I know with certainty is that, at the end, when it’s just him and me, I will do everything in my power to make sure he survives.
7
