Page 39 of Waves (Tangled Crowns #6)

Raj

W atching as Avia realized she was in love with the fight—realized that her blood lust and her physical lust were linked—was the most glorious thing I’d ever seen. She was the epitome of violence and femininity, her lips parted in sensual rage.

It made me burn for her and if I’d have had any control at all, I’d have shifted into myself and grabbed her right then and?—

Shock widened her amethyst eyes, the tiny scales decorating the tops of her cheeks gleaming from a bright flash behind me.

I turned my head, only to feel the spikes on my spine stiffen like hairs on the back of one’s neck.

The heat sizzling past me hardly rattled my scales at all. But her golden hair rose around her, lifting and floating as the energy buzzed through the sky and a jagged bit of lightning break away and soar straight toward my Avia.

No!

A blindingly fierce male instinct rose inside of me. The need to conquer nature and deny fate, but most of all the tender need to protect…a need so fierce that it was cracking and dripping from my very bones. The marrow of me.

Though the wish magic still felt like shackles, weighted me down like chains, I stretched my limbs, spanned my wings, screamed internally at it, “I’ll be the death of her. Not this! Not this!”

And when the searing fire hit my back with a heat more powerful and intense than the fire in my throat, sadness and satisfaction collided within me.

But one final look at Avia—her soft skin, those long lashes, and the universe contained within those eyes, a universe where kindness and cruelty walked hand in hand—made regret impossible.

I braced myself, muscles stiffening for the incoming charge.

Avia’s eyebrows lifted and her lips trembled as she screamed, furiously and (I wanted to believe) brokenly, “No!”

Her fingers twitched.

The entire world flashed white as a thunderclap blasted through my ears. A shockwave rolled through me, shoving my wings down and forcing me to raise them back up slowly as they were pelted with tiny pebbles of ice.

Gulping in a deep breath that erupted as steam before my eyes, the air around me was suddenly ice cold instead of hot.

Was I dead?

But how was I still floating? Why did my wings still ache?

My neck swiveled and I realized that Avia and I were encased in a giant floating globe of ice.

Tendrils of amber lightning zagged across the surface, crackling—making it glow so brightly that I had to squint.

With force that sounded like the lash of a whip, the lightning cracked the ice.

Fractures spread and deepened, and massive chunks of the sphere broke off and plunged into the depths of the ocean below.

But by then, the light was retreating, spent and defeated.

Thunder belted through my ears as I turned back to stare in awe at the queen.

She’d saved me.

Not once, in a thousand years, not even in my earliest memories, had someone ever shielded me, stopped fate from extracting its pound of flesh.

But she had.