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CHAPTER FORTY SIX

I kicked the bars of my cage, the sounds of attack echoing in the distance as if they wanted to remind me of what I was missing out on.

“Hello?” I called, leaning against the metal and pressing my face to the bars, the cold iron chilling my cheeks as I eyed the flames coating the door which led out of here. “Have you forgotten me down here?”

Nothing. I couldn’t even feel the desire for me to shut the fuck up coming from beyond the flames which often accompanied the guards set to stand beyond them.

No curiosity, no lingering need for a shit, no malice, no nothing.

They were gone. And that would have been great, the perfect opportunity for me to run - apart from the mild inconvenience of these damn bars.

I slapped my hand against the thick iron angrily.

It had to have been an hour since the Fury had dragged Everest out of here and by the sound of what was going on beyond this room, battle had broken out in the city.

It looked like the guards had decided the fight was worth abandoning me for despite Kaiser Brimtheon’s comments about not doing such a thing.

But Flamebringers did tend to be a dumb breed.

Ironwraith had come, my people so close I could almost touch them yet here I was, languishing in a fucking cage.

They probably didn’t even know I was here and even if they did I wasn’t foolish enough to believe they’d come all this way for me.

There was no rescue party on its way here.

I’d already been written off. That was just the way it worked.

Same went for any warrior, even my prince.

Stormfell didn’t negotiate for hostages and wouldn’t waste lives on rescue missions either.

I shoved away from the bars, turning towards the rear of my cell but my steps faltered as a flicker of movement caught my attention and I spun back around.

My lips parted as I found that arrogant Dragon asshole smirking at me through the tiny window in the top corner of the room, looking so fucking amused by my predicament that I was damn tempted to smack that look right off of his face. But then reality caught up to me.

Bastian was here. And that meant I was rescued after all.

He pressed his finger to his lips then dropped his hand to the flagstones by his feet.

I fought a smile as the wall below him shuddered and split, lumps of rock and rubble spilling onto the carpet beyond my cell as he used his earth magic to force the crack wider.

The window shattered, fragments of glass tumbling down the newly-formed staircase just before Bastian himself strode down it.

I’d forgotten how damn big he was, my eyes rolling over the breadth of his chest and the cut of his muscles which strained against the ill-fitting Flamebringer garb he wore.

His dark skin was shadowed in stubble, the line of his jaw accentuated by it and the silver of his eyes flashed in the light of the fires in the room.

“I’ve spent the last few weeks hunting you down and I finally got your location by following The Matriarch’s emotionless lump of a son down here, spectre, but you don’t even look thrilled to see me,” he drawled, strolling across the chamber in no hurry at all.

“I’d have packed you a welcome basket but the pickings in here are a little slim,” I replied. “Besides, I’m not kidding myself that you came here for me. It’s that tricky little star bond which has you striding in here like a dog hunting a bone.”

“Your gratitude is a balm to my cold heart,” he said, placing a hand on his chest solemnly and I smirked.

“You want me to thank you?”

“I’m not sure. Why don’t you try it out and we can see how it fits?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Why don’t you get me out of this cage and the cuffs they slapped on me first and I’ll see how grateful I am when the whisperings of insanity recede from my mind.”

Bastian made it to the other side of the bars, reaching through them to take my wrists in his grasp, his fingers encircling the cuffs which had locked my magic away from me.

Fae couldn’t go too long without expelling their power once it had been Awakened and though I’d been vehemently denying it to myself, I knew the itching in the back of my skull was really the first signs of my deterioration beginning.

I needed to flex my magic soon or I suspected I was going to start hearing and seeing things that weren’t really here.

As I considered that, I had to wonder if it was happening already, if the man standing before me was nothing but a figment of my imagination.

But then again, if I was going to conjure an imaginary version of Bastian Carderrin to while away the madness in my mind, I’d have created one with less clothes covering that powerful body of his and a fondness for silence in favour of his constant rabble.

“Well?” I asked when Bastian continued to do nothing more than hold the cuffs between his large hands.

“I was waiting for you to ask nicely,” he explained and I huffed out a breath of irritation.

“Oh please, dear, cursed Dragon who’s bound to help me for his own sake, won’t you do me the great favour of finishing what you came here for and breaking me out of this fucking cell so that we might get back to the business of trying to be the first to betray one another?

” I purred, reaching for his desires, intending to tug on some sense of urgency to get us out of here but instead finding his focus on my mouth.

He surged forward, tugging me towards him, and I gasped as his lips crashed against mine, a flood of want exploding through me and my eyes falling closed before I realised that I couldn’t feel a thing.

There wasn’t the slightest pressure of his mouth against mine nor the urgent heat of his tongue pushing between my lips.

I blinked my eyes open, finding him grinning broadly, still a good foot away from me and not attempting to kiss me in any way. “I thought you said I couldn’t fool you with that trick anymore?” he taunted, causing a burst of fury and embarrassment to flood through me.

I snarled at him viciously, snatching my right arm from his grip and throwing a punch straight at his stupid mouth to show him just how much I’d like to kiss him with nothing but my fist.

Bastian leaned back just enough to make my swing miss him, my knuckles brushing the air an inch from his lips as I slammed into the bars and jerked to a halt.

“Bad girl,” he chided, kissing my knuckles so fast that he was gone again before I could snatch my hand away.

“Don’t do that,” I growled.

“Maybe you should work on blocking me out rather than blaming me for your inadequacies,” he suggested.

“Maybe you should get me out of this cage before I strangle you,” I snarled in reply.

An enormous boom sounded from high above us and the ground bucked beneath my feet as the sound of breaking glass and stone was quickly followed by the thunder of it crashing to the ground.

Bastian caught my hand and yanked me to him, the bars crushing against my chest between us while he threw his free hand upwards and formed a dome of solid rock over our heads to shield us from the falling rubble.

My lips parted in surprise as I stared up at him, his muscles tensing with the strain of exerting so much energy, magic pouring from him so powerfully that I could taste it on the air.

A grunt of effort escaped him, the weight of the collapsing building pressing down over us. With a surge of madness, I tightened my hold on his hand and made him an offer I never would have thought myself capable of.

“Remove these cuffs and use my magic,” I said, his eyes snapping to mine at the suggestion.

“You trust me enough to power share with me?” he ground out, a bead of sweat rolling down his brow as the building continued to collapse overhead.

“Enough to trust you with my life in this instance,” I clarified. “So hurry the fuck up before we die down here.”

Bastian’s silver shot eyes flashed with intensity, his hand shifting to my wrist and encircling the cuff there.

His magic shattered it so suddenly that I gasped, the metal falling to my feet in lumps.

I raised my other hand so that he could break that cuff too, our eyes staying locked as I took his hand in mine again.

“Trust goes both ways, spectre,” he growled, the thunder of more masonry slamming down onto his shield almost drowning out his words. “And I don’t even know your name.”

My tongue stalled against the roof of my mouth, another Stonebreaker whispering in my ear, sweet nothings and promises which were only ever twisted lies. Cayde had known my name and look where that had gotten me.

A lie curled its way around my tongue but I couldn’t push it free, the demand in Bastian’s gaze cutting through me as his grip on my hand tightened.

I could feel the tremor of his muscles in that grip.

We didn’t have long. The whole tower we were housed beneath was crashing down on him and he was burning through his magic too fast to hold it off forever.

It was do or die and though I still coveted death, I knew this wasn’t the end I was owed. My hands were still too clean.

“Vesper,” I admitted, the name a curse on my lips but he drank it in, his pupils dilating as the weight of his power pressed up close to the edge of his skin, my palm buzzing at the promise of its kiss.

I drew in a shaky breath, concentrating on the division between our palms, the roughness of our callouses like battlements on two towers, each as defiant as the other. But both would fall unless they leaned into each other.

My breaths grew ragged as I forced my mind to calm, my power burning hotly against the confines of my skin. It had been trapped inside me for weeks. Much too long, much too potent. And it wanted out.

The barrier between our magic shattered like a pane of glass, cutting into us as it fell and slashing the divide between us to ribbons.

I gasped as the solid weight of a mountain drove itself beneath my skin, the howling wind of my own power whipping around it, tangling with it, combining with it and making me release a heady moan.

The joining of our magic was like a fuse finally meeting with dynamite, the following explosion ripping through the two of us in a wave of potent pleasure before diving into Bastian’s body and tearing free of him again with a blast that had my breaths coming raggedly.

Bastian’s grip on my hand was brutal, my grasp just as tight, neither of us ever wanting to part our power again.

It was sinful, blasphemous. I could feel the might of earth and stone in my veins, my own magic turning to feed his, becoming one with the element of my enemy so easily it didn’t seem right that this could be so very wrong.

Dirt and rock exploded away from us, blasting out into the sky and revealing the heaped ruins of the tower which had tried to bury us, a jagged wound left in the side of the palace.

I tipped my head to face the sky, the rush of Bastian’s magic still burning through me in blissful pleasure more intense than any orgasm I’d ever known and more addictive too.

Freedom beckoned me to it and Ironwraith blotted out the clouds overhead.

I stared up at the floating slice of my homeland, the relief I should have felt in its presence lacking because that meant that I was home already. This stolen time away from my role in that place had come to an end before I’d even realised how much easier I’d been able to breathe away from it.

Bastian gripped the bars which still divided us and bent them away from me, never once releasing my hand, making no attempt to part the rampant flow of our magic.

The cage crumpled under the influence of his power and as the cage fell away, he stepped closer, the few inches those bars had kept between us dissolving. And then his mouth really was on mine.

My shock was stolen quickly by the heat of his skin, the rough demand of his lips and the powerful hunger in his body.

My traitorous lips parted for his, welcoming the press of his tongue against mine alongside a rough moan which rolled up the back of my throat to join in the betrayal.

His fingers pushed into my hair, pulling me closer and my body fit against him like it had been moulded to do nothing other than that.

It wasn’t a kiss between enemies. It wasn’t blind lust or selfish want. It was fire in the dead of winter, a shock of lightning to my bruised and silenced heart, it was thunder breaking over a desert and it was the awakening of a creature I’d almost forgotten I could be.

Kissing Bastian Carderrin was treason of the highest form. Yet even with the shadow of my homeland looming over us, it was a sin I couldn’t stop myself from committing, no matter the consequences for my infidelity, or the price I’d no doubt pay for it in the end.