Page 19

NINETEEN

LUCIEN

H e shouldn’t have brought her here.

Not to this place.

But Evryn needed safety—and he needed distance from everything else long enough to not run from what was clawing through his chest.

The Lost Gardens lay tucked beyond a rise of blackroot and bone-pines, hidden by old glamour sigils only those with Shadowline blood could pass through without being torn apart. It was a place of memory. Of mourning. And magic.

No one had tended it in over a century. But the shadows still remembered.

Lucien guided her through the last of the mist, their boots crunching over ancient petals turned to dust. The silver-glow vines curled from the stone walls, pulsing faintly with life, and the trees grew in winding, impossible spirals, their trunks inked in twilight bloom.

Evryn stared, breath caught between awe and reverence. “What is this place?”

Lucien stopped at the heart of the garden, beneath an arching veil-tree whose leaves shimmered like moonstone.

“It was where my great-grandmother courted her mate,” he said quietly. “And where my mother buried his bones.”

Evryn blinked. “It’s beautiful. And sad.”

“Like most things born from love in this realm.”

She didn’t speak. Just stepped further into the clearing, brushing her hand along the curling vines.

Lucien watched her.

Watched the way the garden responded to her, flowers unfurling slightly as she passed, the shadows bending toward her, not in threat but in recognition.

She didn’t know what she was. But the world did. And maybe that was why he struggled with who he was when he looked at her.

Not because she was terrifying. Because she was becoming . And it made him want things he’d buried long ago.

They sat beneath the tree, the moon a broken coin overhead, casting their silhouettes in violet and silver.

Evryn leaned her back against the trunk, her head tilted toward him.

“You never talk about her,” she said.

Lucien blinked. “Who?”

“Your mother. Not really.”

Lucien exhaled. “What is there to say? She taught me to kill before I could read. Told me mercy was weakness. Made me a weapon sharp enough to carve her enemies in half and silent enough to pretend it didn’t cost me anything.”

Evryn was quiet. Then she whispered, “But it did.”

Lucien’s throat closed.

She reached for his hand.

He let her.

“Do you ever wish you could be someone else?” she asked.

Lucien met her eyes. He scoffed. “Every damn day.”

She leaned forward then and he let himself fall into it.

Their lips brushed, soft at first. Then again, deeper. More certain.

Lucien’s hand slid to Evryn’s jaw, the other anchoring against her waist. Her breath hitched as he pulled her close, their bodies aligning like they’d been made in tandem and only just remembered it.

The air between them hummed—not with the jagged heat of survival, but the slow burn of something older.

Deeper. Her fingers tangled in his shirt, not tearing but unraveling it, as if the fabric itself had forgotten how to cling to him.

He let her. Let the night breeze kiss his skin as she peeled the layers away, her palms skimming the scars he’d never explained.

She didn’t ask. Just traced the ridge of one with her thumb, her gaze flicking up to his. “You carry so many stories.”

“And you’re the only one who doesn’t flinch at them.”

Her laugh was a low, fractured thing. “Maybe I like the way they feel.”

Cloth pooled around them, ink-black wool against petals turned to ash.

The veil-tree’s leaves trembled above, scattering light like shattered glass over her shoulders.

He kissed the hollow of her throat, the pulse there wild and insistent.

Her back arched, a silent plea, and he obliged—lowering her to the moss with a reverence that made her snort.

“Since when do you move like I’ll break?”

“Since never.” His teeth grazed her hip, blunt and punishing. “But this isn’t a battlefield.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” Her nails scored his spine as he dragged his tongue up the slope of her ribs. “Feels like surrender.”

“Then lose louder.”

She did.

When he finally sheathed himself inside her, it wasn’t with the desperation she’d come to expect from him.

Slow. Deliberate. A blade finding its scabbard after centuries apart.

Her gasp fractured into a moan as he stilled, forehead pressed to hers, their breaths mingling.

The garden held its own breath around them—vines curling tighter, shadows pooling like liquid consent.

“Still think this is surrender?” His voice roughened, fraying at the edges.

Her hips rolled, taking him deeper in response.

He laughed, a dark, ragged sound—and let her set the rhythm. Let her nails carve half-moons into his shoulders as she climbed.

Her legs locked around him, heels digging into the small of his back with the ruthlessness of a siege engine.

When she came, it wasn’t quiet—it was a thunderclap.

A raw cry tore from her throat, savaging the garden’s mournful silence, her body clamping around him like a blade being forged.

The veil-tree shuddered, moonstone leaves cascading over them like frozen tears as her hips bucked.

She arched, her sweat-slicked chest dragging against his, peaked nipples tracing searing paths across his skin with each ragged breath.

“Again,” she snarled, half prayer, half command, fingers knotting in his hair.

He obeyed. His thrusts turned brutal, each snap of his hips a controlled eclipse—darkness meeting radiant hunger.

Her eyes blazed silver, pupils swallowing the violet whole, a mirror to the fractured moonlight above.

The scent of crushed night-blooms rose thick around them, the air itself vibrating as she clawed at his shoulders.

“Not— fuck —not the noble restraint act now.” Her nails gouged fresh wounds into the old scars along his spine.

His laughter came out a growl, the panther in him reveling in her ferocity. “You want heat?” He dragged her hips higher, angling deeper, his voice gravel and embers. “Then burn with me.”

She did.

Her second crest hit like a landslide. The garden seemed to bend —vines snapping taut around stone, shadows braiding through her hair as her back bowed off the moss.

Her cry fractured into a guttural sob, her body a vice of pulsating heat.

Lucien’s control splintered. Three more strokes—each one a rebellion against the end, her name a profane hymn on her lips—and he surrendered.

His release slammed through him, a silent quake that locked his jaw against the groan threatening to escape. Teeth found the juncture of her neck and shoulder, biting down as if he could fuse them there. Shadows writhed against the ground, alive and hungry, as he spilled into her.

When the tremors subsided, her fingers uncurled from his hair, trailing down to splay over his racing heart.

The garden exhaled.

Above them, the tree’s branches knit back together, blooms unfurling in their wake.

The leaves kept falling. The shadows kept coiling. And the garden—the damned, traitorous garden—bloomed where her sweat dripped onto the bones beneath the moss.

He rolled onto his back, pulling her with him. Her head settled on his chest, ear pressed to the drumbeat of his heart.

After, they lay curled beneath his cloak, her breath soft against his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath her ear.

Lucien ran his fingers through her hair, silent.

Evryn shifted slightly. “You okay?”

Lucien nodded, voice rough. “More than.”

She smiled against him. “Good.”

He kissed her temple. Held her closer. Lucien didn’t feel like a weapon anymore, the first time since he could remember. He felt like a person, His own.

He felt like hers.