Page 71 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

After holding ourselves apart for so long, we could not seem to stop touching one another.

We lay awake for a long time, stroking and caressing.

Garrick was fascinated with exploring the curves of my stomach, the dips and swells that he’d personally seen to with his cooking skills.

I twirled his silvery, silken hair around my fingers. It was even softer than I’d imagined.

I dragged my fingernails lightly over his jawline, where a sheen of silver stubble was just starting to appear. I could still feel his heartbeat. The blood in my veins surged to match its tone and tenor, though I had no heartbeat of my own.

“I need to ask you something,” I murmured.

The realization had been flitting at the edge of my consciousness for the last week, ever since I’d awoken from my feverish stupor.

But it had crystallized in the moments before my climax crashed over me, when we’d joined not just our bodies, but our souls.

“The Devotion Gate,” I said.

Garrick’s hand paused, halfway up my stomach on its way back to my breasts. He lifted one brow.

I swallowed past the tightness in my throat. “Isanara is not the reason Ramkael allowed you to pass through.”

I waited for him to deny it. There was still a chance, however infinitesimal, that I was wrong, that my emotions had betrayed me. But I forced myself to tip my head back and meet the intensity of his turquoise gaze.

“Say it.”

I inhaled the cinnamon and wine scent of him to give me the strength to say the words that would change everything. “It was because of me. You did not prove your devotion to Isanara. You proved your devotion to me.” A shaky exhale. “Why?”

Garrick’s throat slid. He was as vulnerable as I was. “You know the answer.”

My heart no longer beat. It did not pump my blood. If anything of the organ remained inside of my chest, it was long dead and shriveled. But with Garrick’s chest pressed to mine, his own heart beating rapidly, I felt a shift inside of me. If not in my heart, then in my soul.

I knew what he meant, but the words scared me more than the realization.

Garrick did not press me. He leaned down and brushed his lips against mine in a silent, gentle answer that it was okay to keep the words inside, for now.

My hand shook as I reached up and tucked a strand of silver hair behind his ear. A tiny stud sparkled in his earlobe. I’d noticed it before. I turned it gently with my fingertip, a small smile curving the corners of my lips.

“It is so at odds with everything else,” I said softly.

Garrick’s mouth quirked. “My mother insisted. She had it pierced when I was a boy. There is a legend among her people that amorite can protect young men from evil. I wear it to appease her.”

Human legends from distant continents. But it was sweet—and it was only the second time he’d mentioned his mother.

That bit of himself felt as precious as every other secret we’d shared.

We knew one another in the present, in the crucible of the gates.

But maybe we could share the other parts of ourselves as well.

“What happens if we pass through all of the Seven Gates together?” I wondered aloud.

Garrick’s brow furrowed, that familiar divot appearing. “What do you mean?”

I reached up and pressed my thumb to the mark, determined to smooth it. “No one has ever made it through more than five, and by that time, they were attempting them on their own because all the other supplicants were dead.”

I tried very hard not to stumble over the last word, even though I’d seen its truth again and again.

For hundreds of years, I’d been a front-row witness to death.

I’d wielded it myself, even here in the gates.

But saying it felt personal—a reminder that the fifth gate loomed.

And if we passed through it successfully, we would join the ranks of just one other.

And face what was perhaps a certain death.

I dug my nails into my palms as I forced the words out. “There is no rule that states only one person can conquer the Seven Gates.” And then, even more dangerously, “We could make it together.”

Garrick turned his head into my shoulder, pressing a kiss to my collarbone. “You wish to rejoin your coven.”

Yes, that was why I’d entered the temple. To save Kyrelle and to save myself. Despite the coven mark and my lingering power, a witch by herself could not survive forever. But if we made it through all the Gates, if we broke Velora’s curse… we would find ourselves in a world remade.

Why shouldn’t we remake it to suit ourselves?

“First, we must survive the Memory Gate,” Garrick said. Another kiss. A distraction. I was not ready to name the feelings between us. Garrick was not ready to hope.

For now, just having one another was enough.

Wingbeats overhead announced Isanara’s arrival.

Garrick pressed a kiss to my hair. “Later,” he promised.

Because we would have a later. For as long as the gates permitted, for as long as we could make it so. And even then, even if the inevitable, probable end came… after that night, I knew that I would never be alone again.