Page 165 of Scorched Earth

Marcus looked away, the muscles in his jaw clenching. “I don’t want you to go. Let me send someone on your behalf. It doesn’t need to be you.”

Annoyance rose in her that he didn’t understand why she had to go, why she had to liberate her people.

“I know what you’re thinking.” His voice was soft, his eyes on the ceiling as though looking at her would fracture what remained of his control. “That you feel this is your responsibility. That you need to see it through. That you refuse to let that letter out of your sight. But”—his throat moved as he swallowed—“I’m afraid that you’ll step through that xenthier stem and I’ll never see you again. That Cassius will hurt you if for no better reason than to hurt me.”

It was possible. They both knew it. Yet she said, “I will come back.”

“If he hurts you,” Marcus whispered, “I will take this army back across the seas and burn him alive.”

Shock radiated through her. For the depth of his sentiment. For the gravity of the threat. But most of all because she finally realized what Cassius was so afraid of.

Standing upright, she curved a hand around the side of his face, her sodden braids clinging to her skin. “I will come back to you.” She pressed her forehead to his. “I swear on the Six, no matter what happens, I will come back to you.”

“There is no one in the world with more power to hurt me,” he said. “Yet no one I trust more.”

Then his lips were on hers, and all the emotion that had been locked up in their hearts for so many long weeks was unleashed.

He half lifted her out of the bath, and her breasts pressed against the cold steel of his armor, a gasp tearing from her lips as his hands slid down her naked back to grip her bottom, holding her against him.

“Are you sure?” she asked between kisses. “I need to know this is what you want.”

“You’re what I want.”

Teriana wrapped an arm around his neck, biting at his bottom lip even as she fumbled with buckles and straps. Metal clanged against the floor, some of it falling into the water, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was tearing away the last of the obstacles between them. All that mattered was making him entirely hers.

“I need you,” he said between kisses, letting go of her long enough to pull his tunic over his head. “You are everything.”

Words she’d dreamed of him saying, and to hear them from his lips made her heart accelerate, the swell of emotion making it hard to breathe.

She tipped her head back, the sensation of his lips on her throat sending sparks through her body, tension building in her core. It went beyond want, because in this moment, the need she had for him was like the need she had for air. Bracing a foot against the bath, Teriana pulled him into the water.

It sloshed over the edge from their combined weight, and Marcus laughed softly against her throat as he unbuckled the vambraces on his wrists, tossing them aside with a splash. But humor gave way to deeper sentiments as her legs wrapped around his waist. Her lips found his, their tongues in each other’s mouths, it not seeming possible to be close enough.

They’d already learned every inch of each other, but it had been so long that this felt like the first time, everything touched with a thrill of nerves that made her breathless. That made her want more, so much more, so that when they claimed each other, it felt like the first desperate breath after being caught in the undertow.

She’d thought there was no future for them. That the end was an inevitability, and looking forward had been so very hard. But now? It felt like her whole future stretched out before her, and with every beat of her heart Teriana knew with certainty that her future was with him.

Her breath came in ragged little pants after they fell still, the echoes of pleasure that had rolled over her making words impossible, all the problems they faced having been vanquished if only for a moment. A moment she clung to, not saying a word lest she shatter the peace and send them both hurtling back to a world full of those who’d do them harm.

It was Marcus who shifted first, pulling away slightly so that he could look in her eyes. “I love you, Teriana.” He tucked the braid bearing the tiny ship he’d given her behind her ear. “I know I don’t say it enough. That I don’t show it enough. But know that there is not a moment that goes by that is not touched by you.”

Any doubt that she was making the right decision vanished. This was where she was meant to be. He was who she was meant to be with, and together, they would defy every odd. “I love you,” Teriana said. “Now and until the end of time.”

He tangled his fingers in her braids, kissing her. Teriana allowed her mind to drift into imaginations of the future, of all that they might have, only for a familiar voice to jerk her back to reality.

“So it’s true.”

Teriana started in surprise, then looked past Marcus’s shoulder to find Bait standing next to the balcony railing, his face twisted with anger.

“You’re his gods-damned lover!”

Her skin turned to ice even as Marcus snarled, “How did you get in here?”

“One of your own soldiers told me you were with her. Brought me up here and left me in another room to wait.” Bait’s hands balled into fists. “You idiots always forget we know how to climb.”

Oh gods oh gods oh gods,was the only thought that repeated in Teriana’s head because this wasn’t how she’d wanted her crew to find out. This… this wasn’t how the situation was supposed to go.

“Everyone was saying it, Teriana,” Bait hissed as she scrambled out of the bath, feet slipping on the tile as she pulled Kaira’s dress over her head. “Everyone up and down the continent said you were sleeping with our enemy, but I refused to believe it. Idefendedyou. But it was the truth. You’re the Cel dog’s—”