Page 58

Chapter Thirty-Seven

A stra’s eyes shot open, no longer floating in the Rift, but back in her study, on the floor, wrapped in warm arms that smelled like oak and leather.

She gasped for a breath, her head swirling from the lack of air. Two brown eyes came into focus, hovering before hers.

“Oh, thank the gods,” Lux breathed, sitting back on his heels, untangling his arms from her body against every instinct within him.

“What are you doing here?” She pushed herself to her feet, rising over him, a wild expression set in his jaw.

“The Tether disappeared,” Lux gasped, clutching at his chest, “I thought—I thought you were gone,” he rasped, his chest heaving. “I thought you were dead!”

The anger within her melted away at the panic gripping him, so unchained it flowed over whatever walls he maintained with such a rigid grasp, spilling onto the floor in flaming currents. She kneeled before him, gripping his shoulders and forcing him to look her in the eye. “I’m unharmed! I’m here.”

“You were gone,” he said again.

“I was stuck,” she nodded, rubbing small circles on the hard muscle of his shoulders with her thumbs. “You pulled me back,” she insisted, moving her hands from his shoulders to his chest, his heart hammering against her fingertips.

Astra pictured a calm breeze wafting through a red canyon during the brilliant colors of the sunrise, just as her father had painted them, and pushed it against the wall within him. She met nothing but resistance.

“Let me in.” Astra pushed the image again, searching for a crack in the wall.

She slithered her way into his head, his heart slowing as she set him on the edge of the canyon with a gentle breeze, a bird singing.

His breath relaxed and settled into a steadier rhythm.

Astra watched his face smooth over, the terror easing from the lines in his forehead.

She tried to wriggle from his grip, but his arms did not loosen their stronghold. Something about the desperation in his hold coaxed more out of her than she’d planned to tell.

“I went to The Flare,” she whispered.

Whatever calm she’d achieved disappeared into a crimson mist. “You did fucking what ?—”

“I know! I know. It was dangerous.”

Lux dropped his hold on her, grasping her face in his hands. “Dangerous! It was—it was beyond danger! You’re trying to kill me, I swear to the gods.”

She pushed through the flailing tendrils of anxiety from his chest as he worked to tuck them away again.

“Leona and Solan were Tethered. You were right. It wasn’t an attack. Selenia told them they could sever the Tether to stop the gods’ interference. They were trying to rebel, but it didn’t work. It killed Leona. The Flare was a reaction to Solan’s grief?—”

Lux shook his head, a thick fog gnawing at his senses. “Wait, wait, wait, go back.”

“It’s easier to show you.” She cradled his face in her hands, reliving Leona’s last moments for him.

His heart stuttered and jumped as The Flare’s unholy light began consuming the realms. It had taken Solaris first, and then claimed the Inner Courts before dissipating in the rings of Saturn, only just brushing Pluto with its lethal kiss.

His arms tightened around Astra’s waist as Selenia’s chilling glare caught hers.

When she dove into the Rift, she dropped her hold on his stubbled jaw.

“Gods,” Lux sighed, smoothing a curl behind her ear. “This changes everything.”

Astra nodded, holding his gaze, daring to prod at his statement. “Everything?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. He knew exactly what she meant.

She leaned forward, pushing into him the way she’d stopped herself from doing so many times.

Her hands crawled his chest and explored those golden dunes of his face.

She nipped the edge of his jaw, reveling in the salt of his skin like she had in their dream.

Lux’s fingers wrapped into her curls, a reflex as she moved against him.

Emboldened by the way his body unfolded against hers, like two stars thrown into the same orbit, she snagged his earlobe between her teeth and whispered, “How did you get here so quickly, Commander?”

Lux hung his head back, a blush creeping over his neck she wanted— needed to chase. She laughed against his searing skin as she read the vulnerability in his posture.

“You were already here.”

One side of his mouth curved upward as he looked toward the study door.

“I went to Venus today. I came to talk to you.” Her heart sank. The Tether desperately tried to lasso around it and hold it in her chest where it belonged, but she was plummeting toward the Court Below at a rapid pace. Astra leaned back on her heels, putting space between them.

“Don’t look at me like that. History may not have happened exactly how we thought, but war is still racing toward our courts. We are still each other’s biggest threats?—”

“No.” She said it simply and felt no need to elaborate.

“What?”

“No,” she repeated herself, shaking her head. Everything in her body pulled taut as she spoke with the conviction that, in this moment, she was exactly where she should be.

“You’re wrong, Luxuros. I know it in my bones.

We were born for one another.” She touched one hand to his chest and pressed the other to hers.

“I was forged with sunlight in my veins, just like you. The same black shadows wrap both our hearts. You cannot escape the shades of me any more than I can exhale the smoke of you, and I will not pretend I want to. I belong to whoever you are, whoever you were, and whoever you will be—you only have to summon a shred of bravery to claim what’s yours. ”

The commander’s gaze fell to her fingertips, pulling at his chest as if to wrap her palm around his very heart and squeeze his thrumming pulse back into a regular rhythm.

“I don’t want to keep extinguishing this for the sake of your nerves. You saw them—you saw Leona and Solan. They let their fear destroy one another. They thought they had to fight it to win, and they lost everything. We aren’t bound to that same Fate!”

“Astra.”

A single word. Not a question.

A boundary.

She released her hold on him and rose to her feet.

She couldn’t look at him. Everything within her rolled into a black ball, tightening with each breath she took to cool the flames rushing to her fingers.

She sat in the chair behind her desk and pulled a stack of parchment to the center, unable to see Cam’s elegant script through the tears that boiled against her amber irises.

The commander’s shadow moved over the letter, hovering across the desk.

“Just go,” she choked out. “I’ve laid myself bare at your boots enough times.

I’ve left nothing tucked away in my soul and it’s still not enough.

I cannot show you any more proof, and I am far beyond the years of thinking I can wait out a made-up mind.

Go and leave me to gather whatever shreds of dignity I still have. ”

“ Please .” He reached for her chin, but she pulled away, leaving his hand hollow in the space between them.

Gripping the edge of the desk, she tapped her foot against the rug beneath her, ready to burst. She lifted her eyes, willing the tears to stay behind the rims of her lashes.

He begged again, hopeless in his resolution.

“Please.”

Astra snorted, chewing on her tongue but unable to bite back the words. “I believe you said you don’t beg.”

She’d seen Luxuros angry plenty of times. She’d seen him frustrated, irritated, annoyed. She’d seen him perplexed by his irrational affinity for her, plagued by his denial. She’d even seen him outright pissed.

But she’d never seen him seethe.

She’d never seen him burn the way she burned.

His eyes flickered with a single flame as he leaned over the desk, hands planted on either side of her. He dropped that terrible wall within him, releasing the flood of blacks and maroons and blues and golds he’d kept at bay for months.

Lux spilled out the anger, the guilt, the loathing all over the desk, racing toward her fingertips.

He poured so much of it out before her, she finally saw what lived beneath it, cowering in the corner of his soul.

The ache for her. For them .

She drew in a stilted breath, unable to get enough air between them.

His voice was chillingly strained against the current of emotions. “Is this what you want? To drown in all my misery?”

She shook her head in disbelief, rounding the edge of the desk to stand before him. Her eyes drank him in, every frown line carved into his face, every twitch of his jaw as she let him rot in his confession.

“Is misery what you think I feel?”

He whispered, “Isn’t it?”

Astra reached for him but stopped herself, still unsure where his iron will and scarlet desire intersected.

“All that hurt within you, it’s there. Of course, it’s there , I won’t deny it. But it only lasts for a moment. Do you not recognize what’s living just under that black blanket you cling to?”

A well of confusion opened up in the center of his chest, pinks and reds and oranges swirling beneath the stormy sea he couldn’t see beyond. She lifted a finger, running it over his heart to his stomach. “Here.”

His chest expanded with a breath he’d been holding for thirty years, covering her hand and resting it against the edge of his lungs. Lux’s eyes closed as he dropped within himself, further than he’d ever ventured. His eyes flashed open, fixing on her.

“None of this was supposed to happen.”

“Do you think you’re the first man in all the courts, shit ,” Astra laughed. “The first man in these very palace walls this week , to say that?”

He laughed, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “What makes you think we’ll be any different from Solan and Leona?”

The image of them kneeling across from one another flashed in her mind, sending a shiver down her spine. Yes, they’d destroyed each other. But Selenia had made sure of that and her mother allowed it. Her muscles pushed her into his arms. Nothing inside of her fought anything about him.