Page 54 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

“Ryson,” she offered without a moment’s thought, not out of eagerness, but for the moment, she felt incapable of any other response. He was solid beneath her, still holding the weight she’d given him, the responsibility, the control, and she was in no way eager to take those things back.

She felt his laugh under her chest.

“Perhaps in a few minutes when you’re a little less pliant,” he whispered into her ear, the words playful but strained.

She wanted to be this thing forever, this free, airy thing, incited into a fire at his whim, no thought or judgment, but as the minutes passed, she began to regain some sense of herself, leaning away from him slightly as if she’d just woken up from a dream.

He moved fingers along her face and through her hair, watching her eyes. He grazed her lips with his fingertips as if he so badly wanted to kiss her. “Will you heal me?” he asked as if he’d never asked before, as if it hadn’t been a part of their negotiation from the start.

“Yes,” she said and meant it with everything in her. Healing him was exactly what she wanted to do, reminded that even now, his pleasure was only in seeing hers, and beneath his skin were wounds of a lifetime lived in warfare.

He combed a hand through her hair and, looking into her eyes, said, “It’s almost time. You should get some rest.”

“Will you be okay?” The question sounded strange coming off her lips. Clea almost wanted to withdraw it as this small sphere they existed in expanded to the rest of the world, a world with other implications and consequences.

“I have every intention and motivation to end this,” he murmured, scanning her face. “I don’t want you to go.” At last, he admitted what was obvious to them both.

“I’m going,” she said firmly, all resistance returned, and he nodded, as if that, too, were obvious.

Her hands remained coiled into his clothes, and looking up at him, she whispered, “The Ryson I came to know didn’t remember his past.” There was a request in that statement, and she wondered if he’d sense it.

“That didn’t seem to matter at the time,” Ryson replied, smile soft, and she noted how often he seemed to smile compared to the version of him she’d initially met in the woods.

“I want to know you,” she whispered back.

“You already do,” he replied, and she kept her gaze fixed to his, and his smile slowly faded. The quiet continued on for a moment before she curled into the shell of his arms, looking down at the stone under them before she closed her eyes.

“Everything before you is an infinite darkness,” he whispered.

“All of the lights before you were a mimicry of my own imagination. You wanted life and all its toils. It wasn’t a negotiation.

My tired heart was drawn to that, and I became a slave to the sanctuary that you were, a temple in which I could finally exist. I’ve taken every measure to try and foster the same for you. ”

“By lifting the mantle of the city’s responsibility,” she whispered, interpreting his intentions for herself, “by inviting me into the forest.”

“And after you heal me of my sifting, I still intend to take you there, into the woods. You can exist where no form or structure binds you, only my own, with your consent, so that you can understand what it is to surrender to something as I surrender to you.”

“I feel that way now,” she whispered thoughtlessly and then opened her eyes, only then realizing how vulnerable the admission had been. In this moment, she felt like little more than a worshipper at his whims.

As if sensing the subtle nature of her tension, he lifted her face to his. Looking into her eyes, he breathed, “What you feel right now is the smallest fraction of what we could be.”

She couldn’t imagine anything beyond what she’d just experienced, swallowing slowly as he traced his hand along her neck and slowly unfastened the golden necklace she wore.

She heard the heavy metal slide into his palm, and she watched it lie there like a golden viper, freed from her throat at last.

He seemed to be offering it back to her, and she debated taking it.

She debated synching it back around her throat like a shackle when it had once been a protective guard.

Deliberation exhausted her mind, and she folded her hand around his, closing his silver fingers around the golden necklace and hiding it from sight.

She exhaled and rested her head against his chest, leaving the choice in his hands where she now rested her tired soul.

He did not return the necklace.

Her thoughts began to wander to other things, her questions flowing freely just as they had in the woods with him.

“What does Prince do with the bodies?” she asked.

There was a stir and then a pause, followed by a subtle groan. “Prince is the last thing I want to talk about right now,” he mumbled somewhat humorously.

“I was just curious,” she offered with a chuckle.

“You’re always curious.”

“Tell me,” she urged, smiling as she looked at him.

“It’s going to ruin the moment,” he replied, raising an eyebrow, and she was surprised by her own laughter.

“Pointing out the moment ruins the moment. Now, tell me,” she urged, nudging him.

He tilted his head back with another groan, looking up at the ceiling as he held her. “He builds cities. Out in the Wraithlands.”

Her brows furrowed. “With corpses?”

“Corpses, skeletons, mummies. He builds cities and is always running them.” He rubbed his face with his other hand.

“Gods, by now, he could have hundreds. I visited one once. They have shopkeepers, families, kings, servants, but each corpse is like a poorly paid actor. It is very disturbing. I would not recommend it.”

Clea stared, mouth agape. “The power it must take to maintain all of that.”

“If he were focused, he’d be the most powerful Venennin that perhaps ever existed,” Ryson replied easily. “But you know him. Can we discuss anything else? Prince is probably my least favorite subject.”

“Let’s talk about you,” she replied and he winced and smiled.

“Nevermind,” he whispered.

She didn’t relent. “Why are you so at ease, when the version of you I knew…was perhaps more angry? You are accommodating when you were once rather brutish.”

“Because I am rather brutish. I am rather angry,” he glanced down at her. “Don’t mistake my countenance. I haven’t changed. My flaws remain more intact, concealed only by my power.”

“You warned me you were dangerous,” Clea whispered and almost urgently added, “that I should distance myself from you. That the powerful version of you was ruthless.”

His free hand moved back to her face, a silver thumb moving across her cheek as his expression softened. “None of that has changed,” he breathed. And then he said the words she felt through her body. “Only then, I didn’t have you yet.”

She searched his eyes, recognizing how she was wrapped in his arms, having shared both her feelings and her body. Only minutes ago, she’d begged his name, pleaded it at his command, in desperation of his touch. She realized that his words were more true than ever. He had her now.

None of that has changed.

He hadn’t truly changed.

She had.

She nodded and laid back against him, hiding how his words had shaken her.

They stayed for a moment longer in the comfort of shared company, until at last, they went their separate ways and Clea returned to her room for the tentative hours of rest she’d have before they met the Ashanas in a pit of devastation.

She closed the bedroom door, undressed slowly, and got into the bath. Looking into the mirror, she, too, retraced the lines of her illness and knew he had replaced her illness with something much worse.

Beneath everything else she’d been told that she was, this was not an act she could play or a role.

Beneath all that she’d trained and learned to be, the very essence of her being was meant to be soft.

She was a healer, and any natural thing ached for its natural form. Perhaps that’s why it was so dangerous.

Ryson was the opposite in every way. Craving freedom and control and relishing it, but having sacrificed his own light in the pursuit of power. She was so clearly the holding place for the thing he no longer felt he could contain in himself.

They fit perfectly together, were natured for each other, and those forces were base and untrainable.

By nature, desire, and destiny, she was to be owned, and he was to own.

In a cosmic folly, they’d found each other, and once the Heart of Loda, she was also now its greatest weakness because she was his.

His kiss on the altar had been his knife, and she had been the offering, sacrificed then in a ritual, for he’d said even then that the only purpose of purity was sacrifice. And through every effort on his behalf, every time she’d risked her life, she’d been purified for such a thing as this.

This game was of another caliber, and he was an expert player, but in the strangest way, most bizarre, she had so much of the power, and there was a tragedy in that.

Soon, she would embark with him to face the Ashanas and end the plight that faced her people.

If they lost, that would be the end, but if they won, there would be a choice to make. Because she’d made a fatal mistake, a mistake, perhaps that many healers had been doomed to make. In falling in love with healing, she’d mistakenly fallen in love with the wounds of the world.

She looked at her body, retracing with her eyes all of the paths his hands had taken.

She was convinced that anything more than what she’d just experienced tonight would transform her beyond recognition.

In those moments, nothing else that she knew mattered, mattered.

She was acquainted with that dangerous part of her self that cared for nothing beyond the sensations of him.

It was no longer a fear of that possibility that haunted her.

Tonight, she’d experienced the reality, and had slipped into it so easily, so wantingly.

Retracing the memories, she curled her arms around her body, already sensing the growing emptiness that wanted nothing but to go back to that moment again, to offer him more than a sparing moment in a temple. Tears prickled her eyes. She swallowed, tilting her chin up as she clenched her teeth.

Her feelings had evolved, but the facts hadn’t changed.

He was a Venennin, a slave to his vices. She was a Veilin, a slave to her duties.

She’d lain on the altar, but soon, he would be on hers, and her knife was infinitely sharper and more cruel. She’d wield the blade of his trust, and to salvage her city, and herself, she would have no choice but to kill him.