Page 142 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, smelling that scent that’s uniquely, deliciously him, but also the tang of salt in the air, as if the sea were really just outside the walls of our tent.

“One thing I can taste,” I say, and press a kiss to his lips.

When I draw back from him and open my eyes again, we’re not in the tent anymore, we’re in the healer’s hut, perched on the bed where in real life right now, Callif is sleeping off his injuries. The ghoulish version of Rosa in the wedding dress is gone, and there’s no other come to take her place.

“Better,” Shemza says, smiling down at me. “How is your head?”

“Hurts. I can feel it throbbing, even though there isn’t anything there.”

I touch a hand above my eye to be sure and find only unbroken, smooth skin.

“No, you appear as fully well.” He frowns. “The dreamspace is not supposed to form when a person is injured as you are. We should not be here at all.”

He says it while caressing my back, eyes full of concern and such love, his tail snaking around my calf the same way I’ve seen Anghar do to Ellie so many times.

“I don’t want to be here.” My voice comes out hoarse, fragile. “I want to wake up. I couldn’t wake up before.”

“You do not wish to be here because it has been frightening, or because you are here with me?”

He says it so lightly, as if it wouldn’t be devastating to him if I rejected him. I wince, hating that I can’t take the joy in this that he deserves.

“Shemza, my heart is yours. It always has been. But I’m afraid that you aren’t going to want it.”

He gives me a look of stunned confusion. “Why would I not want it?”

“Shall we find out?” Rosa says.

I look at her, and she’s standing by the door to the healer’s hut. Only, instead of the rough wooden door, made from branches, it’s an ornate door, wrought iron and glass. It’s too small, but I recognise it. I know where it will take me.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she says to me again.

She’s back in her prison jumpsuit, no garish wounds across her chest. Just the Rosa I know. Achingly familiar and distant at the same time.

“What would you do with your freedom?” she says.

“It’s the wrong question,” I say.

“Then what’s the right one?”

“How do you become free?”

“And?” She arches a brow.

“I don’t know.”

Shemza takes my hand, draws it to his lips.

“You do not feel you are free?”

He speaks the words against my knuckles, and it sends a shiver through me.

“No.” The admission whispers out of me, my voice barely strong enough to form words. “I never have been. All my life I’ve lived in a cage.”

“And yet you have landed in Lina’s forest, far from where anything from your world can follow you.

You are invited to our village to live freely with us.

Whatever cages other people have kept you in, you are not in one now.

” He brushes a thumb across my temple. “That says to me that the cage is in here.”

I blink hot tears loose.

“Then you know I can never be free of it.”

Shemza gives me a thoughtful look. Another person might have rushed to protest against my words, to assure me I’m wrong. Not Shemza. He always considers everything.

“Is this why you have drawn away from me these last few sunsets? Because you did not want me inside your cage with you?”

“I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to hurt you. Ever. I love you.”

His hands are on my face, his forehead pressed once again to mine.

“Then our heartspaces are in alignment, my Lorna. We both want the same thing. We both want this bond.”

“There’s a difference between what you want and what you can have.”

“You can have it. You do have it. We are here together now.”

I drag my face away from his, swiping at the tears on my cheeks.

“And you will wish your goddess had given you to another when you see who I really am.”

“You better show him, JoJo,” Rosa says.

Shemza looks over at her, and the door beside her. Then he rises to his feet, pulling me with him as he takes a step toward the door. As we get closer to it, it gets bigger, until it’s the size I remember it being in real life. Rosa nods to us, then steps aside.

“I don’t want to go in there,” I say, my whole body shaking.

“You do not, and yet you do,” Shemza says, dropping to his knees so he is closer to my height.

“It is here, in our dreamspace, is it not? I have not brought it here. I do not know this place. It has come from you. She asks you the question ‘how do you become free’ and you say you do not know the answer, but I think part of you does. I think the answer is behind that door. I think you need to go through it.”

He’s so calm, the same way he was when he dealt with Callif’s terrible injuries.

The same way he was when I woke up on the beach to find him leaning over me.

He’s like an island in the middle of my storm, and I want to shelter in him.

I always have, I think, even before I really recognised those feelings for what they were.

That calm has always been drawing me in.

“There is nothing beyond this door that we do not have the strength to face together.”

He gets to his feet again, but he gestures for me to go ahead of him, to open the door. He won’t force me to go through it. It has to be my decision.

I glance back to the healer’s hut. How do you know you are free? I still don’t know, but if I don’t change something, I never will be.

I turn back to the door.

Step forward.

Open it.