Page 62 of The Second Death of Locke

He made a noise low in his throat, but he was breathing easier. She looked at him, double-checking his collarbone, then went to run her finger lightly near the collagen of his left ear, where the curving top had been cut off at a diagonal.

His gaze was fixed on her, utterly reverent. He was looking at her like she held all the magic in the universe. She knew Kier, and she knew in an abstract sense that Kier loved her, but until this moment, this look, she had not considered that he loved her more than he loved magic.

“I didn’t know what it was about your power,” he said, “until that time, before we were bound, when I didn’t have you.

I’d always taken you for granted—I was spoiled, growing up with you beside me, with the knowing.

But… with you—it has a scent. A feeling.

It’s sharp, and honed. It smells like the sea, mineral and clean, tinged with salt.

I can almost taste the force of it—I can feel it in the back of my teeth.

” He took in Grey’s gaze and shook his head.

“I’m not explaining it right. Anyone else’s magic is watered down.

Tavern beer when the bills are catching up.

But you’re a shot of liquor. And here it’s…

” He took a deep breath, eyes sliding shut, drunk on magic.

“It’s in the air. It’s in the land, the stones, the trees.

And it’s coming from you. It all feels like you .

Gods, Grey, I’ve never felt so safe in my life. ”

It took her a moment to recover. “That’s something,” she said finally, haltingly, “considering there are warships from at least four separate nations bearing down on us.”

One of his eyes slipped open. “But Scaela is still our ally?” he asked quietly, thumb skimming over the back of her hand, rubbing circles into her skin.

“And Cleoc Strata,” Grey said. “As far as I know.”

He nodded, taking it in. She focused on the cold seeping through the stones, the wet shirt pressed to her skin under her battle padding, the breeze that slipped through the spell-slits in the walls.

“I’m so sorry,” Kier said finally.

“For?”

He chewed his lip. “I didn’t know… I thought you’d listen to me, for once. That you would just let me do this. I didn’t know I was forcing your hand, forcing you into reclaiming Locke.”

“You thought I would let you die?”

“I hoped you might,” he said, the faintest of smiles on his lips, and it made everything in her ache.

She shook her head, banishing Kitalma’s words as she searched for her own. “I would’ve come for you. I’d always come for you.”

“And I you,” Kier said.

“Then you should’ve known.”

“Maybe. But all I could think was… Grey, I never wanted you to feel like that girl again. Alone. Abandoned.”

Grey looked at him, his long eyelashes and hazel eyes and the persistent stubble cropping up already on his jaw, the cut glass of his cheekbones, the stubborn silver on his temples. “I need to tell you something,” she said.

She needed to tell him a great number of things, actually, but that was beside the point as she struggled to put the least of them into words.

He caught her hand. “You can tell me anything.”

She took a breath, tried to school her features.

The sky was steely gray, slipping toward darkness at the edges, a sunset without the presence of sun and gold and amber.

The steady sort, like someone dimming a magelight until no glimmer of it remained.

But it had been that way since they had arrived; the darkening sky had not darkened nor lightened; instead, it had stayed in transition.

Grey realized, in the back of her mind, why the silence was so odd: there were no birds.

She felt the constant pull of Kier, the thrum of taking as he transformed her power into magic. The most familiar thing in the world.

She opened her mouth to tell him about it. About his death. About her choice. The words did not come—they stayed lodged in her throat, and Kier looked at her expectantly, and she could not do it.

Instead, she said, “I didn’t know, when we bound. That it would be different for you and me. But Kier—it has made you a Locke. That’s why Scaelas and Cleoc came for you. Because if they risked you, if you figured out how to call Locke from the sea, it would’ve worked.”

That guarded look returned. “But you are…”

“I am still Locke,” she said. “Still the High Lady. But you are a part of this Isle, too.”

He glanced away, shuttering any emotions. “Do you regret it?”

“No,” she said quickly— but I fear you will , she did not say. “I did not realize… I did not know then that it was that much of a union. In more ways than I suspected.”

His gaze softened, and there was something unfair about the way he looked at her, like she was the central point in his universe—she did not know how to convey, with word or look or deed, that he was the central point in hers .

He dropped her hand. His fingers moved along her jaw ever so carefully to cup her face. “I knew, when we swore our bond,” he said, “what I was doing. That I was giving all of myself to you. It’s a gift, Grey—it’s an inevitability, in some ways, that all I am would be yours.”

She shook her head—she could not tell him about his death; she could not reveal that she had stolen that, too. “But that’s not it. I have taken everything from you, even your family name. And now I’ve put a target on your back—they will want to kill you as much as they want to kill me.”

The light came to his eyes, the mirth etched into his jaw, looking insouciant in that way he always somehow managed to. “They already want to kill me.”

“But now, it’s real .”

“And you thought being the commander of Locke wouldn’t put a target on my back? That mattering to you in the way I do would make me a desirable hostage?”

“Not in the same way.”

He pulled her close, nose touching hers. “I am yours, Grey. If that makes you Seward, so be it. If that makes me Locke, then it is done. I am yours and I have been since the day we were bound, and even before that. I don’t care for the name, or the title, or even for the power. I care for you .”

She took a shaky breath and leaned in to press her lips to his.

Cold—they were both cold, so cold that she knew they were possibly in shock and definitely tripping head-first toward hypothermia, and she needed to face the rest of the rooms in the fortress and get a fire started in one of the big grates; but Kier was kissing her, and they were safe under the shield, and for right at this moment, that was enough.

She needed to tell him the truth. But the Isle was still around her, and safe, and she had not felt a safety like that in years. She let him kiss her; she did not think of the cold of his lips, the frigidity of his corpse, as she tried to force him to live again.

He broke away after a moment, breathless. “What do we do now?” he asked.

Her numb fingers skimmed over the healed edge of his ear. “Now, we do our best to survive.”

He kissed her again, tasting of blood and salt water. “We’ve already made it this far.”

But not far enough .

Though the mist made her uneasy, she was glad of the time they had away from the rest of the world. She needed time alone to handle what needed to be done next—and because Kier already knew the worst parts of her, she could permit him to see it too.

Halfway down the stairs, she said, “I think we need to start with the bodies.”

Her voice did not catch. She did not look at him over her shoulder. She only kept her eye turned down on the treacherous spiraling stone steps; and then briefly out of a passing window, where she could see the Ghostwood in the distance.

Kier’s hand touched her shoulder. “Let me,” he insisted.

She shook her head. “I have to do it. But perhaps… Clothes first, I think.”

Procrastination. She did not know how her body would betray her when they walked to the hall in Osar where she knew her parents’ bodies were, or the cellar below, to find the charred remains of Severin’s.

Then there was the household guard, who used to carry her on their shoulders when she was a child so she could see the storms rolling in; the cook, Kimbra, who used to slip her pastries while she studied with her mother, and made her buttery slices of bread with thick broth when she was sick; the people of Osar and Maerin, who called her Little Locke, who pressed kisses to her knuckles when she and Sev passed through the streets.

All of them were dead. Bodies. Rubble. Bones and decaying cloth.

“None of it is water-damaged,” Kier remarked as they passed through one of the upstairs rooms, one she knew was reserved for storage. He stopped to run his fingers over the carved wood of a dresser. “It looks like it’s just been here untouched.”

“I imagine it was bubbled somehow,” Grey said, pulling open the drawers. “Maybe it’s been shielded this whole time.”

It was an assortment of clutter, old furniture and boxes of molded, moth-eaten books and half-burned candles and discarded trunks full of everyday accoutrements that a long-established family discarded but did not dispose of, left in a room after decades and decades of use.

She felt oddly exposed, even though it was only Kier.

She’d basically lived at his house as a child, Pia and Laurella putting her to bed alongside Kier and Lot so often that they procured an extra mattress, stored under Kier’s bed and pulled out whenever she didn’t leave when the sun went down.

She’d known his grandmothers and grandfathers when they were alive, his aunts and uncles—she knew every bit of his family history as if it was her own.

Perhaps his ma and mom had told it to her, filling her with some sort of family to make up for the fact that she apparently had none of her own.

Imarta didn’t mind: she welcomed the influence of Kier’s family.

She had no family left herself, and widowed as she was, it had always been just her and Grey.