Page 71 of Ruthless Knot

Let it all wash away.

Allow the world to see us exactly as we are—two broken people finding each other in the wreckage, two lonely souls finally discovering the connection they've been building through words and hope and the stubborn refusal to give up.

Mine.

I kiss her harder.

Deeper.

Claiming every part of her mouth the way I want to claim every part of her life. The way I want to stand between her and everyone who's ever hurt her. The way I want to burn down this entire academy and everyone in it just for making her cry.

The villain in me—the one I've cultivated through years of survival, through violence and cunning and the cold calculation of someone who learned early that the world doesn't reward kindness—wakes up with a vengeance.

They hurt her.

They displayed her heart like a trophy.

They made her sob alone in the rain.

They will pay.

Every single one of them.

They will pay with blood and screaming and the understanding that they touched something that belongs to me.

But that's for later.

For now—there's just this.

Her lips against mine. Her scent in my lungs. Her heart beating beneath my palm.

The rain falling around us like the world is weeping in relief that we finally found each other.

I pull back just enough to breathe.

Just enough to look at her—at her smeared makeup and soaked hair and those devastating mismatched eyes that are staring up at me like I'm salvation and damnation wrapped into one.

"Seraphine," I murmur against her lips.

It's a guess. At least, the perfect guess after years of clues and wonders.

Based on her initials, on the way the name feels in my mouth, on the intuition that's kept me alive this long.

She makes a sound—surprised, broken, beautiful—and I know I'm right.

"Seraphine," I repeat, tasting it. Claiming it. Making it mine, the way I'm making everything about her mine. "S.E. My pen pal. My cotton candy girl."

"S.W.," she whispers. The first word she's managed to form since I touched her. "You're really... you're..."

"Sage," I offer. "Sage Wilder."

Her eyes go impossibly wider.

But I don't give her time to process.

Don't give her time to think, to question, to wonder what any of this means.

I just lean back in?—