Page 107

On the gates were a mixture of Rave, Ettan, and blood fae warriors who strode along the new parapets across the fortress. Gunnar Strom had a bow strapped over his shoulder, his attention on the sea. Beside him was Eryka.

Perhaps they were restless like me. A blood fae paused at the young prince. Cuyler. Again, did anyone sleep here?

“I’ve run from this and run toward this in every memory I have,” I said, voice soft. “This day is what we have all been both avoiding and building.”

Silas pressed his chest to my back, one arm curled around my shoulders, tugging my body to his. “You feel it?”

“Do you?”

He nodded. “The end we’ve all foreseen.”

“Words came for you,” I told him, turning in his hold, so I could rest my cheek on his chest. “Well, I’m not certain. I woke with them in my mind.”

“Seidr?”

“I don’t know.” Hells, sometimes it was bleeding impossible to figure what was my power and what was a simple thought. “Let the dream descend. That was all I thought.”

“Hold to it,” he said. “It speaks to me.”

“Think it’s meant as a tale? A twist? A premonition.”

“Yes.” He chuckled. “I’ve learned that sometimes the tales and the songs begin small. Simple warnings that you give so well. But when there is power to the words, we ought to hold them close for later. They could build into something larger. It’d be a shame not to remember them.”

“Likely it will be vague as always until the last moment.”

“Possibly not even then for the Norns are rarely accommodating.”

“Such true words. Those wenches.” I closed my eyes, embracing the slow cadence of his heartbeat. “Dawn comes soon.”

Silas hugged me against him in response.

“I like this moment,” I said, gliding my open palms up his firm chest. “In the quiet, with you.”

Silas freed a rough breath when I slid my hands beneath his tunic to his bare skin.

“They’re certainly over too soon.”

I didn’t want to be melancholic, but the thought was there—would we have these moments after dawn came? Time was fleeting, and I didn’t want to miss a single instance with Silas.

“Perhaps . . .” I kissed his throat. “Perhaps we should drag it out a bit more.”

His gaze slammed into me, a tumultuous storm of need and desire. Silas checked the walls once, then grabbed my palm and hurried us deeper into the gardens behind the palace.

Once we were deep in a thicket of flowering shrubs, I opened my mouth to ask where we were going, but Silas silenced any words by pressing my back to the trunk of an oak tree. He hesitated for half a breath, then kissed me. Brilliantly forceful. Silas kissed me like if he did not the whole of the world would crumble yet again.

He urged my body closer until our hips, chests, knees, all of us knocked into the other. I whimpered when the strain of his hard length pressed into my center.

“Time runs short,” he said, pressing kisses down my throat. “What we do with what is left, I leave in your hands.”

In another moment we were shredding the lower half of our clothes away. I fumbled with his belt, the laces of his trousers, until I could shove them down his hips enough his hard length sprang free.

Silas had less patience, less finesse, and tore the waist of my trousers trying to slip them off my body. He spared me a heated look, then lifted me under my thighs, wrapping my body around his. Skin to skin, I thought my soul might split in two. Soaked and starving, I rocked my hips.

With a bruising kiss, Silas claimed my mouth. His tongue slid between my teeth at the same time as a finger slipped inside me.

He took the gasp from my tongue for himself, and added another finger until I bit down on his lip to keep from crying out his name for the whole palace to hear.

He pumped his fingers in and out, deep and slow. My body quaked. I burned for him, for all of him.