Page 30 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

AT FIRST, THERE was only breath.

The land’s slow, low exhale pressed into the base of her spine, curled in the hollow beneath her ribs. A breath not made of air but of memory and heat and motion stilled.

Then came the ache.

A deep, bone-rooted soreness like she’d been cracked open and sewn back together from the inside out. Her thighs throbbed. Her cunt pulsed, swollen and sore, heat lingering between her legs like an echo of him. Her shoulders burned. Her chest felt too wide. Her skin…

Her skin.

It buzzed faintly, like a distant electric current running just beneath the surface.

She could feel the wind move before it touched her.

The grains of sand that clung to her thighs.

The precise way the sun warmed her kneecaps but hadn’t yet reached her calves.

Her eyelashes trembled, and she felt each one.

She opened her eyes.

The world had changed.

Or maybe it was her.

Light moved differently now, sharper at the edges, golden in places it had no right to be. The sky overhead was high and cloudless, same as before, but the blue had depth. Color glinted inside it. The ridge of the Hollow was cracked, but glowing faintly, like old stone holding onto heat.

The air smelled like sage and sweat and blood and bloom.

And underneath all of it—him.

She blinked again.

She was lying on her side in the dirt, naked and dusted with fallen petals, one leg draped over Asher’s thigh. His arm cradled her waist. His body, warm and massive beside her, rose and fell with deep, even breath.

For a second, she didn’t move.

She just felt it.

The aftermath.

The realness.

The hum inside her.

Her mark at the base of her throat no longer burned. It glowed.

She reached up slowly, fingertips brushing the skin.

Raised. Etched. Not a wound.

A seal.

She sat up carefully.

The ache deepened with the shift. Her inner thighs screamed. Her breasts were sensitive. Her hips were sore. She could feel everything.

She glanced down at her legs.

Veins of light threaded her thighs. Faint. Subdermal. Glowing like minerals under blacklight. She touched one and shivered.

Asher hadn’t moved. His eyes remained fixed on her, full of a mix of awe and fear. Like he wasn’t sure if touching her would ground him or break the spell.

“You’re different,” he said again. The same words, but softer now. Full of reverence.

She nodded, his gaze so wide, so open that it made her heart stutter.

She turned slightly, drawn by the glint of light off water.

She crawled the last few feet to a shallow pool nestled in a cracked stone basin. The remnants of rainwater or ritual runoff, still and clear. She leaned over it.

Her reflection looked back.

Not wrong. But not hers.

Her hair was the same, though tangled and threaded with petals. Her lips were bitten raw, her skin still dusted with bloom and ash. But her eyes. Gold-ringed. Not just glowing. Alive.

Something inside her had risen to the surface.

And it wasn’t leaving.

She sat back on her heels.

“I feel…” she began, then trailed off.

There was no word for it.

Changed didn’t cover it. Reborn was too clean. She felt wild. Made of too many things. The light. The storm. The sex. The vow. The heat in her belly.

He sat up beside her. His hand hovered near her shoulder, then dropped.

“You’re glowing,” he said softly.

“So are you,” she murmured.

She reached for him.

Tangled their fingers together.

She stared at their joined hands. At the gold-veined glow that ran between them. At the way their skin touched without resistance.

She turned toward him and really looked.

His body was still vast. Still impossible.

Broad as ever, bark-veined and rooted in something ancient.

But the sharpness had softened. The hard edges that had once bristled like armor now shone with heat and humanity.

His shoulders were less tense. His throat, less guarded.

His jaw was dusted with gold sap and fine desert ash, and his mouth was relaxed in a way she’d never seen before.

His eyes were the same molten amber. But clearer now. No longer a wall of fire. A window.

“You look…” she started, then stopped.

Because it wasn’t just beauty she saw.

“You look real,” she said.

His lips parted.

No protest. No deflection. Just breath.

“I feel it,” he said. “Like I remember how to wear myself.”

Nora reached forward, fingertips brushing the edge of his jaw. She traced the line to his ear, the glowing scar that ran behind it, down the column of his neck.

“You feel warmer,” she murmured. “I didn’t know you could be.”

His mouth twitched. An almost-smile. But his eyes were solemn.

“You changed me,” he said.

She ran her fingers over his chest, finding the place where the texture of him had changed. Skin that had once been bark-like now felt like hot velvet.

“I don’t want to wake up one day and find you a man with a mortgage and a podcast.”

He laughed. Laughed. A real sound. Human and raw and bright.

“Not possible,” he said.

Then softer: “This… what you did… it didn’t erase me. It just let me breathe.”

She dropped her hand.

It hung in the space between them.

Then he lifted his own and caught it.

They sat hand to hand for a long time. Her smaller fingers wrapped in his gnarled, callused ones. Bark to skin. Glow to breath. Sacred and raw.

“I keep waiting to feel like myself again,” she said. “But I don’t.”

“You won’t.”

She nodded. “I don’t think I mind.”

He looked down at their joined hands, then back at her.

“You didn’t lose yourself,” he said. “You walked through the fire. And now you burn brighter than anything I’ve ever seen.”

Her throat caught.

“So?” she asked, finally. “Are you going to vanish again? Melt into the rock like a melancholy cryptid Cinderella?”

He didn’t answer right away. Just blinked once, slow.

“No.”

“That’s it? No poetic declaration? No dramatic refusal of freedom?”

He smiled a little, lines at the corners of his mouth deepening. “You don’t want poetic.”

She sighed. “Fine. But maybe try for a little dramatic tension.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good.”

That broke something gently in her.

She leaned into him, not seeking comfort, not needing shelter. Just wanting closeness.

His arm came around her, low and easy, palm resting against the back of her ribs.

Nora breathed.

His scent filled her again, like earth and sun-warmed bark, iron and sage and something that had always made her think of dust before rain.

She didn’t say anything.

But she felt him speak it anyway.

Mine.

She pulled back enough to meet his eyes again.

They held there.

A long moment.

And in that silence, she saw it.

Not the creature who had taken her in the dark. Not the shadow she had chased across wind-ravaged dreams. Not the force who had swallowed his own fire to guard her through the bloom.

Just Asher.

Guardian. Lover. Witness.

And something gentler now.

Something hers.

“Has the land done this before?” she asked, voice dry.

“There was a time it tried,” he said. “A long time ago. But the ritual ended in destruction.”

His gaze flicked to her glowing skin.

“This is the first time it’s answered. The first time I have.”

The weight of that landed in her chest.

She nodded once. Then again.

It made sense. Even if it shouldn’t have.

The desert didn’t ask nicely. It took. It tested. It ruined.

Except this time.

This time, it had let them through.

Not untouched.

But together.

They stood at the edge of the Hollow.

Not close to it. In it. Inside the ritual ring, inside the mouth of the trial, inside the place where the land had cracked and screamed and begged to be balanced.

Now, the ground beneath them was quiet. Still warm. Still scorched. But no longer writhing with rage.

The storm was over.

Nora stretched slowly, arms above her head, wincing at the pull along her ribs and hips.

“I feel like I’ve been rolled down a mountain and then politely set on fire,” she muttered.

Asher huffed.

That was all. Just… huffed.

It might’ve been the ghost of a laugh.

She smiled, just a little.

They walked together, naked and dust-covered, their bodies still marked in blood and sap and bloom. Her feet were bare. His gait was slower now, less rigid. There was a looseness to him that hadn’t been there before. As if the ritual had softened him from the inside out.

The air shifted as they moved, wind trailing behind them like ribbon.

And the earth…

The earth responded.

With each step Nora took, something small bloomed.

At first, she thought she imagined it. But when she paused and looked down, there it was: a single flower at her heel, white-petaled and open to the sun, growing directly from the impression her foot had left in the dirt.

She blinked.

“Asher?”

He looked down and nodded once, slow and solemn, as if it made perfect sense.

She stepped again.

Another flower.

She raised an eyebrow. “Okay, well. That’s not unsettling at all.”

“Sacred,” he said quietly.

“Yeah. Sure. That too.” She gave him a sidelong look. “But also maybe a little cursed? I mean, what if I walk into a bar and accidentally germinate a cactus next to the jukebox?”

He stopped walking.

Just stood there.

Then tilted his head, mouth twitching.

“I don’t know what a jukebox is,” he said. “Or a podcast, if I’m being honest.”

She stared at him.

Then laughed.

It broke out of her like light through cracked stone. Raw. Real. Joyful.

The sound startled the birds around them into flight.

He smiled.

They kept walking.

When they reached the edge of the Hollow, they turned back, shoulder to shoulder, and looked down over what they had survived.

The Watcher had fallen.

Split clean through, the upper curve of its head collapsed in a spray of dark stone. Vines grew now from the cracks. A fine shimmer of pollen drifted from the breach.

It no longer looked like something watching.

It looked like something that had wept.

Asher reached for her hand.

She gave it without hesitation.

The wind passed over them again. It moved through her hair like fingers. It curled under her jaw like a whisper.

The words weren’t spoken aloud.

But she heard them.

You may stay.

Nora looked out over the basin.

Then at the sky.

Then at him.

“I think it’s ours now,” she said.

Asher didn’t speak.

Just squeezed her hand.

And in the silence between them, something deep and old gave way.