Her smile widens in a way no mortal mouth should. There is a glint beneath her skin that was not there a heartbeat before. Horns, coiled like secrets, catch the light just behind her hair.
When I whisper, “I love you,” I expect her to feel the truth in it.
Instead she tilts her head with an amusement that leaves me raw. “You do?” she murmurs, and it is soft and clever. “How sweet.”
The ground drops out beneath me. Pain arrives like a blade of light. Holy fire finds me in the garden, blinding and absolute. It is not merely punishment; it is a judgment carved into my flesh. The sound that tears from my throat is born of betrayal and burning. I fall, my knees slamming into the earth, fingers clawing at the soil as if the world is something I can hold on to.
My wings flare and catch. Feather by feather they ignite, sinew blackening and tearing away until nothing is left but a memory of flight. I am stripped and falling, a castaway from the heavens, and even while the agony runs through me I reachfor her. Some small and deadly part of me still believes what I believed, still hopes.
She kneels and brushes a curl of hair from my face with a tenderness that mocks the ruin. “You’re no longer holy,” she whispers, the words soft as a benediction and as cold. Then she is gone before I can pull myself upright, before the sky has sealed over the wound. I have not simply been expelled from light; I have been folded into a story that was written without me.
I wake with fire in my lungs, my body jerking as though I have fallen all over again. My hands find the sheets, claws on linen as if I could cling back to what I was. The garden’s echo rings in my ears, her laugh looping under the blood in my veins.
I am not in that place now. I am here, in the fortress, in a room that smells of stone and old heat. I blink hard, the heartbeat in my throat a drum that does not stop. Then I feel her before I see her: Lillien awake beside me, hair a wild halo, eyes rimmed with sleep and worry. She does not ask or pity. She slides toward me, an invitation given without words.
I fold into her, collapsing like a man who has run until he can run no more. My forehead finds the curve of her chest, my arms wrapping as if they have always known how to hold her. She is warm, solid, an anchor that wants nothing mended and gives me comfort anyway. Her fingers comb through my hair, patient and sure. She hums, a sound without melody but full of steadiness, and the ember of panic in my ribs eases.
“You’re okay,” she murmurs, voice small and true. “You’re here.”
I cannot answer. The words do not live in me. Instead I breathe her in—dark blooms, smoke, the faint, animal scent of power—and let it steady me. “I saw her again,” I manage at last, my voice raw. “In the garden.”
She does not startle. She keeps stroking my hair, her other hand finding the back of my neck and holding me. “I know,” she says simply. “I felt it.”
I close my eyes and let the ruined memory slump into the quiet of her heartbeat. It steadies me more than any prayer. I know I may never be holy in the way Heaven intended, but for this small, fragile second wrapped in Lillien’s arms, that loss is a thing I can live with.
I don’t remember falling asleep. One moment the room is a blur of warmth and breath, the next my cheek is pressed to the steady drum of her heart and the world is small enough to hold in my palm. Lillien’s chest rises beneath me, slow and even, skin warm where it meets mine. My arm is draped across her waist, fingers curled possessive not from habit but from need, from something raw that has nothing to do with duty and everything to do with awe.
My lashes open to the dark and I lean in without thinking, pressing my mouth to hers. She lets me. Her lips are soft and full and when I kiss her she answers the way someone answers a prayer. It is not desperate or frantic. It is a long ache finding relief. I pull her closer until our bodies fit like a confession, until her thigh slides over mine and her fingers thread into my hair.
For a while I let the lie that this is enough live inside me. It is not enough. It never will be. When I tear myself away, hollow and heavy as the space between stars, I cross to the floor at the edge of the bed and drop to my knees. Naked, exposed, willing.
My hands rest on my thighs and my head bows. The silence holds me like a chapel. Then the scrape of sheets behind me, thesoft patter of her feet on stone. She stops and stands there—bare legs, bare skin, light carving her outline. Lillien in the doorway is a promise.
She comes to me, fingers under my chin tilting my face up. “What are you doing?” she asks, voice low and careful.
“I’m surrendering,” I say, the truth spilling out raw. “To you. To us.” The words taste like ash and want. “I loved once before. I gave her everything. She used it to break me.” I swallow around the memory. “You’ve seen the worst of me, and you never turned away.” My chest trembles. “I love you, Lillien. I need you to have it. I’m yours.”
She could have laughed. She could have left. She could have shown me the cold calculus of what I have become and told me it would not be enough. Instead her hand moves, the thumb brushing along my cheek. Then she says, quiet and close, “I love you too.” The words are small and they split the dark like light through glass.
“I love all of you,” she adds, “but you were the first I could say it to.” Those syllables are a benediction and a brand.
She lowers herself to me with a slow, deliberate grace that commands and comforts both. Straddling my thighs, she threads her fingers through my hair and guides me, and when she sinks over my cock, I shudder and moan into the warm hollow of her neck. Her arms wind around me and mine tighten until I am sure I will never let go.
We do not move for a long moment. We exist in a place between shadow and flame where nothing else is allowed to intrude. We are raw and ruined and holy in a way that the heavens would not understand.
FIFTY-THREE
His arms are around me. His chest is a wall of heat against mine. I’m still reeling—not just from his words, but from the way he gave himself to me. Naked. Kneeling. Heart first, as if he were offering me something more sacred than his body.
I told him I love him. Because I do.
Not with sweetness. Not in the clean, soft way mortals romanticize. I love him in the kind of way that scrapes marrow and demands blood. I love him the way shadows ache for fire, the way hunger aches for flesh. Reckless. Absolute. Consuming.
So when he slides into me—when my body stretches to take him—I don’t just welcome him. I devour him.
His groan sears into the hollow of my throat, raw and unguarded, and the sound rattles through me like thunder. It’s desperate, frenzied—like he’s been holding his soul together with holy thread, and my touch just cut it clean through.
We move together in a tangle of limbs and sweat-slick skin, our rhythm primal, unrelenting. His hands brand my hips, pulling me down harder, deeper, as my nails carve red trailsacross his back. It isn’t delicate. It isn’t measured. We are long past the point of restraint.
