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“Hurry up,” she begged.

“It’s been months since I tasted you, Vale. I can’t rush.” I bit down softly on the inside of her thigh, her legs squeezing closed. “Are you so impatient?”

“As you said”—she was already panting—“it’s been months.”

I grinned, hovering my mouth in a teasingly slow pattern down her legs. Only light kisses, not leaving anything untouched but nothing touched enough.

“A little longer won’t kill you then,” I said, continuing the torture.

When she was nearly bucking her hips, I pushed two fingers inside of her and finally swept my tongue over her, working into a rhythm that had her hips grinding against me and my name falling from her lips.

She’d been ravenous in the springs, and I thought it stemmed from that rejection she’d admitted. Not from me, but from so many circumstances in her life. Now, all I wanted was to remind her how fucking magnificent she was.

And as she tangled her fingers in my hair, more of that anguish I’d been living with slipped away. As I felt her skin beneath my hands, heard how I made her feel, it was like those pieces of myself I’d felt incomplete without didn’t matter.

Because I had her. This. I could live without the rest, but I could not be whole without her.

I tugged her legs tighter over my shoulders, gripping beneath her ass to angle her better to my mouth. I kept up the pace with my fingers, hitting all her favorite spots and savoring each breathy sound.

“So good,” Vale barely moaned, and fuck, I could come again at that sound.

She tasted like secrets exchanged under starlight—all sweet temptation and promises. I didn’t know how it was possible for every inch of this girl to be starlight, but she was. Her voice, her scent, her taste. All of it was born of midnight magic.

I swirled my tongue around her clit with added pressure. A flutter around my fingers told me she was close but not quite there yet.

So, I demanded, “Let go, Stargirl,” and she did, coming around my fingers and on my tongue until her limbs were limp and her breathing ragged.

I crawled back up her body and tried to prop myself on my elbows over her, but she pulled me flush against her, taking all of my weight on her small frame, and she kissed me so deeply, I forgot where we were and every damn threat outside of this room.

Senseless. That was the word for how Vale made me. And for someone who spent every day worrying about others, senseless was a damn good place to be.

Breaking the kiss, I dropped my forehead against hers and caught my breath.

After cleaning ourselves up, Vale fell back onto the bed. “Now I’m exhausted,” she said, her voice that unburdened, chiming bell again.

“Let’s sleep.” I stripped down to my undershorts and climbed in beside her.

“This bed is truly made for one,” she joked as I made myself comfortable.

“Now it’s for two,” I answered, no room for argument.

Vale laughed, but I thought there was a grateful spark in her gaze. Truthfully, I felt it, too—relief at dropping that aggressive front I’d forced. She settled down against me, my arm around her, hand stroking her hip, and her head on my chest.

“I never told you this in Damenal,” she began, voice already thick with sleep, “but one time I saw you in those hot springs.”

“You saw me?” I asked, still drawing aimless circles against her skin.

“In a reading.” Her voice was drifting further. “I didn’t know it was you then. But I was maybe fifteen, and I saw you as you were when I first arrived in Damenal. Strong. In a training arena, with the friends you loved, surrounded by the power of the cypher trees.”

I swallowed the weight of that confession. “Cruelty and Adoration,” I muttered. We’d experienced both at each other’s hands. Had the Fate been warning her? “I think I saw you,” I admitted, “during my Undertaking.”

Vale shot up, alert. “What?”

“During the part that challenges our emotional being,” I explained, keeping it vague since I wasn’t technically supposed to share anything of the ritual. “I saw you.”

Vale searched my face. Those eyes. It was those olive-green eyes I saw in the Spirit Flame, a stranger then. “What do you think it means?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”