The zareth.
That’s what this must be.
It’s flooding me, filling me, snapping into place.
His power is pouring into my body, and fuck, I feel my soul answering his.
“Come for me, Telya! Let go. Mine,” Kael growls against my bleeding skin, still moving inside me, relentless.
“Yes,” I whisper, lost, undone, claimed.
And as thewhirlpool crests and crashes around us, I know the truth I didn’t want to admit.
I may have been taken from my world, but here, in Kael’s arms, I’m not lost.
I’m found.
Chapter 12
Kael
The Lordof Water’s Bedchamber at Castletide
“Can I have you, Telya? Will you willingly give yourself to me? Become mine in every way?”
My question hangs in the warm steam like a vow I’m about to crucify to the world.
Her answer is a whisper, carried on a breath so thin I worry it might fray at the edges.
“Yes, Kael.”
The word lands like an anchor.
The chamber narrows until all that exists is the pale blue of her eyes and the moon lace spread over her shoulders.
For a heartbeat, I can’t tell where my skin ends and hers begins.
The runes sing under my ribs with a pitch I’ve never heard.
Not the bureaucratic hum of wards, but something like a bell struck in the deepest trench.
I had prepared numbers and rites and arguments.
I had practiced a thousand ways to make the sea answer when it was stubborn.
I had not rehearsed the feeling of being answered in the small, human language of a woman saying yes, whispering my name as if it were a prayer.
Our clothes fall away on my whim and a little magic.
My pulse races, heart pounding as we move, naked to the bathing chamber.
Water is life, and for a Demon Lord, it is a necessary part ofclaiming.
My teeth find the tender line of her throat in the way our elders taught for the zareth.
It’s a marking that is part claim, part consecration.
My bite is sharp and swift.
