His hands drift from my face, skimming down my arms, sliding around my waist. He draws me closer until we’re chest to chest, heartbeat to heartbeat.
“Then what now?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer with words. He kisses me and the moment shifts. Not like before—when want pulled tight between us like a wire ready to snap. This time, it’s slower. Deeper. A tether dropped from somewhere ancient, threading something unseen between us. The water glows brighter. The lava pulses in the fissure. And when we finally pull apart, breathless, I feel something inside me settle. Not like surrender.
Like belonging.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The next kiss ends slowly, like something melting. His lips barely linger as he draws back, breath catching between us. I’m still gripping his forearm, wet skin against wet skin, and for a long, fragile heartbeat, neither of us moves. Then the heat flares.
It starts at my back, a warmth that licks outward like sunrise through my bones. My shoulder blades pulse—no, burn, but not with pain. More like light pushing through a seam. I gasp softly and turn my face toward him.
He doesn’t look startled. Or afraid. He looks like he’s been waiting.
The air between us thickens. Not just steam, but something more. It swells with heat and gravity, as though the spring has turned into the center of the world and we’re standing at its heart. I glance down, toward where the surface ripples between us, and catch gold-red light, pulsing beneath my skin. The branded vines around my wrists, and the shimmer of the wings faintly along my shoulder blades, glowing just beneath the water.
“I didn’t do that,” I whisper. “Not on purpose.”
Caziel exhales through his nose. “You didn’t need to.”
I blink water and heat from my eyes to see his is glowing too, bright against the crimson of his skin. His words settle somewhere deep inside me. I want to ask what he means, but my throat closes up. There’s a pressure in my chest that feels too close to awe, and a little like grief. Because this isn’t just about the Rite anymore. It’s not about trials, orthreads, or surviving long enough to crawl out of the arena in one piece. This is something else.
This is him.
This is me.
This is whatever exists between us now, burning quiet and fierce and unspoken.
The spring glows around us, water shifting with slow, molten ripples. Lava pulses through distant veins in the stone, lighting the cavern in a strange, steady rhythm. The obsidian cliffs hold their silence like judgment—or reverence. No wind. No birdsong. No watching crowd.
Only the quiet sound of our breaths and the thrum beneath my skin. Caziel brushes a strand of damp hair from my cheek. His hand is careful, reverent. Like I’m something sacred. I don’t understand this place. I don’t understand why he brought me here. But I know what it feels like.
It feels like a welcome, not an invitation. A return.
“You’re quiet,” he murmurs, eyes still locked on mine.
I nod slowly. “Trying to find words that don’t exist.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Good. Words are dangerous here.”
My laugh is soft and unsteady. “Because the Flame listens?”
“Yes.” He leans closer, his voice a thread of heat along my collarbone. “And it remembers.”
I feel something stir in my chest—recognition, maybe. Or longing. Or both. He draws back just enough to look at me again.
“You don’t have to say anything, Kay. You don’t owe this place your voice. Only your truth.”
“And if I don’t know what that is?”
His hand finds mine under the water, fingers lacing slowly through mine.
“Then stay until you do.”
I could stay here forever.
The thought arrives fully formed, terrifying in its clarity. I don’t want to leave this basin. This warmth. Him. But that’s not why he brought me here. This isn’t a fairytale escape. It’s a reckoning, and still his gaze doesn’t demand anything from me. He doesn’t look at me like a soldier, or a symbol, or a mistake the Flame made. He looks at me like I’m mine.
